In Visual Intelligence, Ann Marie Seward Barry asks, “How does eyesight relate to insight”. Her inquiry concludes that perception aligned with conception is intelligence. Gunther Kress’s paper “Visual and Verbal Modes” in Page to Screen explains that while the subject’s use of the visual mode for meaning-making is not a new phenomenon, it has been overridden by written language in the past few centuries.

Kress argues that it is only in the latter half of the 20th century that the visual mode has become dominant. The shift from narrative to display is a post-modern trend, according to Kress, requiring a new theory of representation because current theories fail to account for interacting modes of articulation. He treats visualization as translation that is the transformation of meaning between the two interacting modes.

George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle interrogate the archeology of the printed page in The Iconic Page with contributions from Gerald McGann, Peter Shillingsberg, Mary Keeler and others. McGann’s research on Dante Rossetti finds significant “explorations of the picture frame”(126) in "Rossetti’s Iconic Page.” McGann describes Rossetti’s two books, Early Italian Poets (1862) and Poems (1870) as the: “convergence of verbal text and visual design”(126).  Rossetti’s stunning work is an important antecedent for the mode of writing in A New Alphabet. McGann asks about the relationship between the artistic process and criticism:

 Is desire or what Blake called “Energy “ a subject to be studied and controlled or a set of unrealized functions and potentials?

McGann concludes that:

Rossetti was grounded in the conviction that nonlinguistic forms, of book design and typography might embody ideas and conceptual content. (128).

McGann looks to artistic innovation as the source of theory when he states:

 Interpretation would do well to turn to the inventors rather than the philosophers when seeking to learn how to explicate poetical work. (138).

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