My interest areas include: Artists’ books, visual art, experimental typography, contemporary aesthetics, graphic design, digital humanities, and information visualization.
In my multi-faceted career as a writer, artist, and scholar, I publish and lecture on the above-listed topics while continuing creative work making books and conceptual projects. I have worked in many media including letterpress, stone lithography, performance art, and digital production. My current work builds on scholarly attention to visual knowledge, creative work in typography and design as meaning-producing aspects of language. My visual practice seeks to understand natural processes and forces through the study of organic decay. My critical writing includes the study of books, art history, and data visualizations but also extends into speculative thinking in the projects noted below. I continue the work in the field of social physics introduced in The General Theory of Social Relativity. Emergent systems, complexity theory, and theories of quantum entanglement continue to push my imaginative work and writing. I publish critical writing and personal essays regularly on my Substack, JD:ABCs.

Scholarship: My scholarly and critical work began with an interest in visual poetics, experimental typography, and the relationship between meaning and graphic expression that stemmed from hands-on experience in letterpress and book design. It extends to studies of information visualization such as charts, graphs, and diagrams, and includes engagement with digital humanities, a field that has exploded in recent decades in work at the intersection of computation and traditional humanistic disciplines. I have published in art history and continue to write reviews in response to work I that calls for critical attention (see JD: ABCs on Substack). Alphabet studies are a particular passion and inspired early work and my recent, and likely final, scholarly book, Inventing the Alphabet (2022). I am currently working on some YouTube videos to share primary research materials in the intellectual history of the alphabet. For more information: Scholarly Work.

Artist’s books: I began printing my own editions works in 1972 for the simple reason that as a writer, I wanted to make books. Since that time, I have written, illustrated, designed, printed and published dozens of my own works. These have been exhibited and collected in rare book libraries, museums, and other venues throughout North America, the UK, and Europe. A dozen works of my creative work have been published by other small presses. These books have provided an opportunity to work experimentally with visual language and typography, to play with visible forms of meaning production, and to engage with theoretical topics in language and in feminist issues. I have collaborated frequently with artists Susan Bee and Brad Freeman on book projects. I’ve written extensively about artists’ books, not my own, in thethe now-canonical The Century of Artists’ Books, (Granary Books, 1994), and more articles, book introductions, and catalogue essays than I can recall. To access digital facimilies of these works online, click Artist's Books.

Artworks and Projects: I learned to draw by studying organic forms, small bits of plant matter and decayed material. I quickly came to understand that I was observing natural processes, not just forms. This led to an ongoing fascination with stochastic processes, the nature of events, as well as a long-term series of studies of entities. I have created various projects focused on theoretical issues. The earliest was a study of a process drawing that was a record of its own making. Somewhat abstract, this project, done in 1978, titled Experience of the Medium, was printed in Amsterdam and a copy is in the Stedjelik Museum. Wittgenstein’s Gallery,, 1989, took up questions of the differences between language and images. Can a word cast a shadow? Can you conjugate an image? Subjective Meteorology, produced in 2004, used the metaphors and templates of traditional meteorology but mapped them onto psychic conditions as if they could be represented as weather systems. A cold front of a meeting hits a high pressure system of a work deadline and a sudden drop in temperature from a cold judgment on work outcomes and so on. Other ongoing projects include Diagrammatic Writing and topics in Social Physics, still underway. For a gallery of images and descriptions: Art and Projects

Artworks and Projects: Publications and Videos of talks and lectures I've given can be reached through the links on these pages: Publications and Talks & Lectures.

Academic career: I held academic positions at the University of Texas, Dallas (1986-88), Harvard University (Faculty Fellow, 1988-89), Columbia University (1989-94), Yale University (1994-99), SUNY Purchase (1998-99), the University of Virginia (1999-2008), where I was the inaugural Robertson Professor in Media Studies, and UCLA (2008-2023), where I was the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies. I have received Fulbright, Mellon, Getty, and NEH Fellowships.