Sebring researches visual narrative in the digitized historical record and global image archives, the relational grammar of images, and digital-native authoring tools that break traditional text-based forms. Her work places readers in contact with primary sources from the visual record as narrative objects.

In her PhD thesis, “Visual Narrative,” Sebring developed the Visual Narrative Field (VNF) model, a software design for image-based historiography that expands on her work with multiple visual data sets collaborating with historians at the MIT Visualizing Cultures project. 

As narrative objects, visual primary sources carry subtexts often lost in the fixed, linear structure of historical writing. In contrast to written texts, visual data fields sustain a fluid state of unresolved complexity that mirrors the multilinear way in which historical events unfold. The VNF model connects narrative pathways to databases, allowing authors to design image relationships that convey history and analysis through the images themselves.