{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.04143475572047001, 'fraction_numerical': 0.04885590599876314, 'mean_word_length': 4.883636363636364, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Introduction to Show and Tell

journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 4(2): 139-143 [1470-4129(200508)4:2]10.1177/1470412905057348 The last two decades of the 20th century saw a number of thematic obsessions vie for prominence in the American academy: the body, identity, memory, and trauma, just to name a few, all jockeyed for the attention of scholars in many disciplines looking for the best new horse to ride. Perhaps the one that showed itself to have the most endurance and the best prospects for running well into the 21st century is what became variously known as visuality, visual culture, visual studies or the visual aka pictorial turn.1 It is difficult to say with any precision when this particular horse left the starting gate. Perhaps it was the appearance of pioneering efforts like John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), Donald Lowe’s History of Bourgeois Perception (1983), or W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology (1986). Or maybe it was conferences like the one organized by Hal Foster (1988) at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which produced the influential collection Vision and Visuality with essays by Rosalind Krauss, Jacqueline Rose, Jonathan Crary, Norman Bryson and others soon to make their mark with full-length studies of their own. Or perhaps it was the inauguration of programs in visual culture at universities, such as that launched at Rochester by Michael Ann Holly, Mieke Ball, Keith Moxey and Kaja Silverman in the late 1980s.