TV Text Research Articles

Mul'timodal'nost' rossijskih teleserialov: interaktivnoe znachenie i zarubezhnaya recepciya

Russian television series, as a product of Russian culture, reflect the social landscape of Russia and its values. According to semiotics and multimodality, a television series is a kind of film and TV texts, consisting of different modes. This paper revealed the modal diversity of semantic sources of film and TV texts, and also systematically explored the role of five types of modes, including moving pictures, speech, written credits, music and sound effects in the construction of a semantic gestalt of text.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch: It’s time (again) for a re-evaluation

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the stand-out sequel in the Halloween franchise because it deviates so wildly from the pattern set in the original film, and then followed so poorly in subsequent editions. Instead, the John Carpenter and Debra Hill-produced Halloween III takes the form of a ‘pod movie’, in which a toymaker plots to use a television signal to murder viewers on Halloween night. Much of the creative team were regular members of the Carpenter–Hill stable, which is clear in the film’s look, feel and sound. On the occasion of the release of Halloween Kills, and Halloween III’s 40th birthday, this article proposes a critical re-evaluation of the work, highlighting the lost potential in the idea of an anthology series, the lack of serious engagement in the film and the crucial point of the villain having an Irish heritage. The film is also analysed as a ‘TV Text’: films, novels, plays and non-fiction works that are concerned with the effects and mechanisms of television. These were becoming increasingly prominent in the 1980s and beyond, with examples ranging from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) to the late work of Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller.

Tools of Creating Emotional Climate in Knowledge-Based Television Space

The relevance of the article is due to the need to comprehend and identify the specifics of the formation of emotional mood in modern knowledge-based TV texts of an advisory nature. It will make possible to better understand the specifics of educational genres. The purpose of the work is to establish and describe the repertoire of tools for the formation of emotional mood and linguistic means of their representation in a knowledge-based television discourse. The research material was TV broadcasts of thematic groups as follows: leisure, health and healthy lifestyle, home improvement, food, driving, beauty and fashion. The corpus of the texts under analysis is represented by advisory-instructive and informative-demonstrative genres. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that in the texts that broadcast everyday, practical knowledge, tools are recorded and described that simulate the emotional mood of the viewer in the process of learning process. The research reveals that the textual representatives of the advisory and instructive genres of relaxation and hedonistic themes construct an impressions and pleasure zone. At the same time, the accents of texts describing ways of behavior in danger-associated situations (for example, health topics) are focused on regulating the mood and emotions of the media audience. Such texts are constructed based on an emotionally sensual modality that swings the viewer's emotions from negative to positive. The formation of such a diverse emotional tone is aimed at creating a positive attitude towards specific health improvement actions, as well as encouraging adherence to the rules of a healthy lifestyle in society. The article describes the triggers that produce positive and negative emotions, as well as tools for their activation in the text (the image of the author and the image of the addressee; genres of everyday communication, designed in a friendly-informal register; linguistic means). The research reveals functions of impression producing (attracting attention, positive emotional modeling, formation of a positive attitude to the object of expression and persuasive influence) and regulation of emotional mood (socially stabilizing, regulation of behavior, persuasive influence).

Two or three things I know about Tom

ABSTRACT A personal appreciation of the work and legacy of Tom O’Regan, focusing on his 1994 essay “Two or Three Things I Know About Meaning”. Although O’Regan’s work is often described as being concerned primarily with social discourses and institutional contexts in the landscape of audiovisual media, he also paid close attention to the mechanisms of film and TV texts. His view of meaning was complex and multi-factorial, reflecting both his intellectual approach and his personal temperament.

Discourses of Distribution

Occupying the organizational space between television’s culture world of production and its audience, TV distribution serves as the institutional site where the industry implements its strategic transactions of global buying, selling, and transmission. Distribution not only connects the industrial processes of production and consumption to one another: these processes also transform TV texts and their meanings in the process. By clarifying how the site of distribution unveils the “residue” of production and the “anticipation” of consumption in addition to serving as its own unique intermediary function on the circuit, our analysis introduces a conceptual depth, or three-dimensionality, into circuit models by mapping nested discourses of globalization onto circuit models, thereby illuminating vertical as well as circular motion on the circuit. Therefore, subsuming distribution under other circuit processes mistakenly implies that distribution contributes nothing unique to television and its meanings. Ultimately, our introduction of depth/verticality into circuit models provides a new conceptual framework to guide future analyses of the structure and dynamics of the global market. This article is an edited version of Chapter 5 of Global TV (NYU Press, 2008), with a new introduction.

STUDI PENERAPAN DESAIN UNIVERSAL PADA MASJID MANARUL AMAL KAMPUS MERUYA DI UNIVERSITAS MERCU BUANA JAKARTA BARAT

Mosque design based on the universal design principle is a design concept for a mosque architecture that can be used by a person with disability users. Mosque as the center of religious activities is ‘Allah’s house’ where the congregation conducts praying. Shalat is essential to worship in Islam done at least five times a day and cannot be abandoned unless very specific condition happens (as explained in Al Qur’an). But in fact, hearing disability users still find difficulties in accessing mosques, most mosques are not accessible. This study aims to describe of study of universal design application at the Manarul Amal mosque on the Meruya campus at Mercu Buana University for a person with disabilities. The universal design principle is chosen based on the possibilities it provides to explore each potential tool to reduce or even eliminate the physical barrier for its users. This research method uses a qualitative descriptive method. The instrument of this study was researchers who were assisted with observation guidelines, interview guidelines and documentation guidelines based on the grid Minister of Public Works Regulation No. 14 / PRT / M / 2017. The steps of data analysis carried out include: data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion. The results showed that the interior elements in the Manarul Amal mosque were in form of circulation, guiding paths, ramps, prayer rooms, sermon rooms, ablution rooms, shelves for footwear (shoes and feet) and supporting facilities attributes that didn’t meet the standard. While the walls of a room aren’t equipped with handrail, lighting, and colors are sufficient to meet the standards and audiovisual that is around the prayer room without a TV text, visual alarm (sound calling when praying).

Come a Long Way: Bob Marley, Reggae, and Aotearoa / New Zealand Popular Culture

ABSTRACTThis article addresses how representations and reception of Bob Marley and reggae in Aotearoa/New Zealand have changed, with special reference to recent local films and TV. Marley and reggae in New Zealand have always been identified with resistance to colonization by Māori (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand) and Pasifika (Pacific Island) peoples, but this view simplifies the ways that popular music is mediated and remediated. In 2013, Māori made up 15% and Pasifika 7% of the New Zealand population. Examples include recent film and TV texts by Māori and Pasifika that feature Marley and reggae, none of which highlight protest. Does this change reflect the “mainstreaming” of a radical figure, or something more complex? This essay analyzes Marley as a “star”, as a set of media texts and discourses, and examines how he is currently being remediated, as older electronic and print media interact with digital media. It also looks at how these films position Marley and Māori/Pasifika in relation to New Zealand culture and the history of popular music and film in that country.

Two Televisual Guernicas: Genius: Picasso (National Geographic, 2018) and El Ministerio del Tiempo (RTVE, 2015–2017)

This article examines two recent television versions of Picasso in the USA and Spain, focusing on the production and reception of his masterpiece Guernica. Reading the TV texts within the specific context of the biopic and science fiction series and the more general framework of the tension between everyday domestic television and quality or complex TV, the article argues that National Geographic's Genius: Picasso (2018), true to its title, offers an individualist view of artistic creation in which the personal takes precedence over the political and, conversely, that RTVE's El Ministerio del Tiempo (2015–2017) integrates the aesthetic object and its creator into the lived experience of the nation and its viewers, preserving and reframing the social dimension of the original work of art.

Still ‘Watching’ TV? The Consumption of TV Fiction by Engaged Audiences

There is no denying that television, as a medium and an institution, has drastically changed in the age of digitization and convergence. For audiences, this has not only opened up multiple opportunities to watch television content at other times and on other devices, but also to interact with its cross-media extensions. However, while much has been written about the new opportunities for audience engagement, we do not know much about the actual adoption of new technologies nor the motivations underlying such uses. Therefore, this paper draws on empirical audience research to address the key question: how do viewers engage with contemporary TV fiction? Through empirical audience research, using various qualitative research methods, three different aspects of the reception of cross-media TV fiction will be discussed: (1) how do viewers watch the TV episodes of contemporary TV fiction?, (2) how do viewers engage with the cross-media extensions of TV fiction?, and (3) how do viewers experience the social dimensions of contemporary TV fiction? We focus on a particular group, that of 'engaged' viewers, who are actively involved by personalizing their viewing practices, by communicating about it, by consuming cross-media elements of TV fiction, or producing TV fiction-related content. Our findings suggest that even this group does not make full use of all the available technological opportunities to personalize TV viewing, and that the classical TV text, linear viewing, and the social aspect of viewing remain of key importance.

Usability evaluation of a new text input method for smart TVs

Smart TVs are becoming an increasingly important multimedia device for home entertainment. A smart TV is a platform that provides access to many types of media and services such as games, the Internet, social networking sites, and TV programs. One of the most important interactions between users and these platforms is the ability to effectively enter and edit text. The purpose of this study was to test a new approach for smart TV text entry that combines a touch pad and virtual keyboard interaction. A prototype was created and tested against existing methods (a simple remote control, a touch pad, and a physical keyboard). Twenty college students were recruited to perform a usability test with each of the four different input methods. Participants performed a text entry task and a text edit task on each device. The results indicate that combining a virtual keyboard with touch pad type functionality for text entry and editing can lead to faster text entry and faster text editing.

It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

It's Been Beautiful: and Power Television by Gayle Wald (with photographs by Chester Higgins). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 288 pp, ISBN-10: 0822358379, reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs.This book examines the right story to tell-one of, in author Gayle Wald's words, fragile alliance of liberal and radical interests, both public and private-and, thankfully, arrives at the right place (p. 39). Soul! (1968-1973), a nationally distributed public television program that could loosely be described as the radical sister of the more commercial Soul Train, fired the imagination and reflected the multi-faceted sensibilities of its community of viewers. Using largely untapped wells of research about the early days of American public television vis-a-vis America, Wald relates a nuanced story of how the condescension of white American public television officials seeking to provide an outlet for the angry community in the late 1960s, led to a (largely) Black-controlled showcase of the Arts Movement on (largely) aesthetic terms. It is the restrained approach, however, of choosing as this book's scholarship basis intellectual sources outside the soul of Black/African folks that makes this book strangely appealing and more than a little irritating.Soul! (episodes of which can be found online) was first a product of insurrection. Reacting to that outpouring of anger and violence, white funders, somewhat accidentally, allowed a producer, Ellis Haizlip, to have his way. WNET-Channel 13 (now known as Thirteen), then and now the New York-based flagship station of the PBS collective, wanted a companion show to Black Journal, its newsmagazine. initial and white idea of a Black Tonight Show developed under Haizlip into a Arts salon that was cooler than the The Flip Wilson Show and Don Cornelius' large Afro. Wald wisely includes as much of Haizlip's life story into this book as she can fit. (Mr. Soul, a documentary film on Haizlip's life and work done by his niece Melissa Haizlip, is struggling to get funding.) letters of support Soul! received are well used in Wald's book. They show the involvement of the community instead of just describing the appreciation of an audience.It's Been Beautiful builds somewhat on Devorah Heitner's Black Power TV, a pioneering 2013 intellectual narrative on the early days of East Coast public affairs television, and does so with great intellectual gusto. Wald, a professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University, rightly uses the New York-based Soul!-a program that would feature, for example, Nikki Giovanni interviewing James Baldwin or a studio performance of Last Poets, or Earth, Wind and Fire-to find key TV text of the era or as a cultural project joined by common cause to 1960s and 1970s political struggles (p. 4).The show's arc matches its era: Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed two weeks before the grant to create the show was submitted and it was cancelled because PBS's funders, facing the onslaught of the Nixon era and the fading of the Power movement, wanted to create programming that would have Blacks and whites interacting (p. 63).Hence, the author discusses Soul! as a program, along with its performers and producers-are worth the price of the book alone. Wald does not shy away from explaining American culture in all its glory and anger. But she does not seem to want to dig into the African, non-Western roots of what she is seeing and describing. …

In the Living Room

This article is based on a small pilot project exploring the role, function, and meanings of second screens and companion apps for TV audiences that is contextualized by existing academic audience research. This is mapped alongside industry research and academic debate about second screens. The results illustrate some disjunction between industry expectations of usage and viewers’ everyday experiences. I argue that industries’ tendency to conflate “viewer” with “fan” indicates a less than nuanced understanding of the television/companion app audience. Further, the lean forward/lean back binary applied to digital media users and television audiences respectively points to a problematic not addressed in much industry literature, while the respondents for this research indicate a complex interplay between the pleasures of viewing that incorporates the social and the personal with the second screen and the TV text.

Public Broadcasting through the Public Sphere: A Reimagining of Public Service Media in New Zealand

During 2013, the New Zealand government heralded the launch of the Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) and Rural Broadband Initiatives (RBI) as significant tools across a range of economic and social policy areas, including the delivery of education and health services and the promotion of development policies for Maori. Conspicuously absent in the associated political discussion was the issue of public service broadcasting and the possibility for internet-based technologies to provide an efficient and cost-effective platform for the production and delivery of non-commercial public service media. The reason for this omission may be due to the governing National Party's historic disregard for public service broadcasting, as demonstrated by its disestablishment of a number of public broadcasting initiatives since 1999. Drawing on a Habermasian theoretical framework and Dan Hind's concept of ‘public commissioning’, the purpose of this article is to outline an alternative system for public service broadcasting based on a series of referenda and on open public debate. I begin by examining the present public broadcasting system and the traditional centrality of the state in governance and gatekeeping issues. I argue that the communicative potential of social media, enabled by universally accessible ultra-fast broadband, could provide an adequate platform for public gatekeeping, with the state having a significantly reduced role. I make the argument that the technological and resourcing mechanisms for such a system already exist, and the required shift in audience culture is already present in the consumption of entertainment and reality TV texts.

Teen TV Meets T4: Assimilating The O.C. into British Youth Television

This article explores the presence of imported US Teen TV in the schedules of British youth television and the relationship between the two national forms. Focusing on the broadcast of The O.C on Channel 4 youth strand T4, it considers the role of the spaces in-between programmes in framing the audience’s experience of the imported US text. It demonstrates how the T4 supertext employed presenter performance, critique and parody to assimilate the glamorously aspirational US Teen TV text into the cynically engaged flow of British youth television.

Connection between News Narrative Discourse and Ideology--Based on Narrative Perspective Analysis of “News Probe”

There are various methods to interpret the TV text and narrative analysis is a deconstruction method that studies the internal form of a narrative text. Narrative discourse analysis regards the construction role of text as the focus and it has a close connection with ideology, especially in news report. That is, ideology controls news narrative discourse, whereas news narrative discourse helps to construct the existing ideology. This paper is going to take as an example the CCTV “News Probe”, the representative of news investigation programs in China, deconstructs the text from the perspective of narrative perspective and further makes clear the connection between news narrative discourse and ideology.

My Students and Betty White: American Television History in the Classroom

My Students and Betty White:American Television History in the Classroom Marsha F. Cassidy (bio) At a time when television historians are correcting the omissions of the past, scholars are making careful choices about their object of study, mindful that selection itself governs what counts as history.1 These revised histories also situate television within the broader framework of American cultural history, employing a range of fresh interpretive approaches that help rectify our understanding of TV's past.2 These same two principles of scholarship lie at the heart of my undergraduate courses on television history: they acknowledge the significance of historical selection and its instability, and they probe how the drift of cultural history frames and reframes meaning. While disparate influences are currently striving to outline a canon of TV history, television scholars generally concur that the object of study has become much less stable in the digital age.3 Nonetheless, a course syllabus demands choices. Writing about a parallel dilemma in teaching an unstable film canon, Virginia Wright Wexman concludes that instructors may now teach whichever films "best match their own interests and those of their students," but with the caveat that they must be prepared to defend their choices.4 A well-wrought syllabus for a TV history course [End Page 86] likewise obligates instructors to defend their choices by articulating to their students the theoretical and cultural ideas that informed these choices. To paraphrase Gerald Graff, courses on television history will be enlivened by "teaching the quandary" of inclusion and omission itself.5 The dilemma of an unstable canon is not that difficult for today's undergraduate to comprehend. Twenty-first-century students arrive in the classroom well versed in TV fragmentation, multiplicity, and fluidity, and are thus primed to accept television history (indeed, all of "television") as a mash-up. Students are quick to agree that it has always only been possible to study fragments of television history, since even full episodes are mere fragments of a series, just as series are only partial representations of television flow and overflow.6 With this principle in mind, my students screen fragments of varying lengths, sometimes a full episode of Roseanne (ABC, 1988-1997) or Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-1989) and sometimes much briefer clips, such as an online "minisode" of Gidget (ABC, 1965-1966) or a five-minute clip depicting Leland's death on Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990-1991). Discussing such key segments highlights the fluidity of TV history's object of study without subtracting the meaning that even fragments can provide. To further drive home the mutability of TV history, students are required to select a television text not covered on the syllabus and present its significance to the class. In addition, students are assigned a discussion topic and asked to locate relevant television fragments from the Internet; they then reassemble these fragments online to produce a new digital history for their classmates. After viewing cigarette ads from the 1950s and 1960s, for example, students uncovered more recent expressions of TV's attitude toward smoking. Among the best was a clip from Frasier (NBC, 1993-2004) that one student called an "ode to smoking," in which a character extols the secret pleasures of cigarettes.7 Through these assignments, my students collaborate with me and with each other to create the object of historical study for the semester. The cigarette assignment is one of many asking students to scrutinize a TV text's historical and cultural frame of reference. Students are quick to discern TV's blatant glorification of smoking in the 1950s versus a more ambiguous allure at the end of the century. I trust I am not alone in noticing that many of today's undergraduates are uninformed and uninterested in "the past" (anything that happened before 1990). Yet I have also observed that in today's multiplatform world of reruns and asynchronous replays, students have become unwittingly accustomed to time shifts and recontextualization. In the spring of 2010, my students surprised me by introducing a first-rate example of historical reframing. In our study of the political economy of the Super Bowl, students agreed in unison that one of their favorite ads featured...

<i>Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet Karen Hellekson (bio) Sharon Marie Ross, Beyond the Box: Television and the Internet. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 280pp. £19.99 (pbk). The subtitle hints at the focus of Sharon Marie Ross' book: Beyond the Box analyses what Ross calls teleparticipation, or opportunities to engage with television outside the show itself, mostly online. Such engagement implicates more than the viewer, who is presented here as an active participant in making meaning: joining the viewer are the show's writers, producers and marketers, among others, no longer lurking, invisible, behind closed doors but now reading the boards and forums where fans congregate to discuss the show – Television without Pity being the most famous example (www.televisionwithoutpity.com). This smart, accessible book can be read usefully with Jason Mittell's various publications on narrative complexity, particularly in terms of Lost (2004–); Matt Hills' analysis of Fan Cultures (2002); Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture (2006); Sara Gwenllian-Jones' work in Cult Television (2004); Annette Kuhn's 1984 study of audience published in Screen 25.1, 'Women's Genres'; and Ross and Louisa Ellen Stein's edited volume on Teen Television (2008). Ross interviewed and surveyed fans – her sample limited, as Ross admits, in that most were white American women – in an attempt to understand how consumer relates to producer. In her analysis, she explores the notion of an Internet-connected social audience for a television show, now that such a connection is practically a given; how fans, fandom and engagement with the source text might have changed; and how consumption of television has altered. The shows Ross analyses include Xena: Warrior Princess (US 1995–2001), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (US 1997–2002), American Idol (US 2002–), Lost (US 2004–) and the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim lineup of cartoons geared to adults, such as Family Guy (US 1999–2003, 2005–) and King of the Hill (US 1997–). One chapter is given over to analysis of teen expectations of teleparticipation. Some, but definitely not all, of these shows might be classified as cult television, a difficult-to-define term that revolves around the (lack of) a programme's perceived mainstream acceptability. Ross describes cult television as a show that tends to invite active fan engagement, such as writing fan fiction. Cult texts often have nonrealistic elements, perhaps supernatural, perhaps fantastic, perhaps science fictional, as well-known examples Buffy and Xena demonstrate. But as Ross rightly points out, although much scholarship has explored the notion of the cult show, in part because the engaged fans create artworks that fan studies scholars like to analyse, the notion that can be drawn from it – a social audience – transcends the cult status and the genre of a programme. [End Page 142] Ross chooses to focus on television rather than other visual media, such as film or Internet-released, visual texts, because she wishes to emphasise the ongoing nature of the extended narrative, which comprises many episodes and perhaps many seasons. Ross argues, following Walter Benjamin, that 'the Internet as an extension of the TV text may be contributing mightily to a revitalization of storytelling' (25), which, thanks to teleparticipation, extends beyond the source. The move from beyond the screen to an ancillary source, the Internet, imbricates an already extended narrative. Further, Ross wants to deal with the fans of the show, a stance that places her book firmly within the realm of fan studies as well as the more general field of media studies. Indeed, her conclusion describes the empowerment of fans in various fan-spearheaded, save-the-show campaigns, driven in part by a sense of the emotional connections experienced by the fans. Affective engagement results in feelings of ownership, yet at the end of the day, The Powers That Be are still the storytellers and the true owners of the text. Despite this, however, if TPTB decide to engage with fans, they must be prepared to have an actual conversation. They can not drop in, make a pronouncement, and leave: Ross speaks of heightened 'expectations for intimacy and connectedness; and while this dynamic revolves primarily around the community online, it applies to anyone entering that space' – writer, producer or fan...

"Emotions-Only" versus "Special People": Genre in fan discourse

This essay looks at genre as a complex set of discursive threads running unevenly through production, TV text, and fan reception. Through a case study of the reception of fan favorite Roswell, this essay interrogates the role of genre in spectatorship. In its mixing of teen and science fiction elements, Roswell trod upon contested generic spaces, eliciting strong reaction from its viewers. Connections between genre and gender came to the fore, as producer commentary linked science fiction with male audiences and teen romance with female audiences. Fans responded with analyses that greatly complicated and at times overtly rejected industrial suppositions regarding the gendered work of genre. Through these fan conversations, we can witness the complexity of genre as discursive thread moving through not only TV texts but also multivariant fan responses. I intend this essay to work at two levels. My analysis of fan responses to Roswell models the possibilities of a close study of genre discourse. At the same time, my case study probes the nature of genre in fan engagement, as genre discourses intersect with other fan concerns such as character identification, perceptions of textual quality, and questions of gender representation. While we cannot necessarily look to fan accounts for proof of how viewers engage with genre, they do tell us how fans frame their engagement with genre, how they incorporate genre into their performance of fannishness, and how they perform and thus enact genre itself as a shared cultural process.

Linguagens na TV

Este artigo aborda questões relativas às estratégias discursivas utilizadas na produção dos textos televisivos. Com base na Análise Crítica de Discurso (ACD), nos termos em que é formulada por Norman Fairclough, o trabalho analisa os modos pelos quais as linguagens (incluindo materiais semióticos diversos) são articuladas na/pela TV, sistematiza as relações entre a articulação de linguagens e a produção de efeitos de sentido, bem como os modos de sua inscrição nas tendências discursivas contemporâneas, a saber: democratização, tecnologização e comodificação. A partir das relações entre as práticas de linguagem e as tendências destacadas, o artigo tece considerações sobre as condições de produção de leituras críticas dos textos multimidiáticos, nas suas múltiplas dimensões: dos contextos e mecanismos da produção textual à pluralidade constitutiva de sua recepção.

Visual performance and reading capacity of partially sighted persons in a rehabilitation center.

Visual acuity and reading performance of 178 partially sighted patients from a rehabilitation center were measured using a TV text display device. A linear relation was demonstrated between visual acuity and reading speed for patients with visual acuity values below 15% of the normal value. With respect to reading performance, three groups of partially sighted patients could be distinguished: (1) 25% of the patients are unable to read visually and require tactile reading aids; (2) 50% are partially sighted and require high-magnification electronic reading aids; (3) 25% can read normal text by using optical magnifying devices. There is evidence that reading performance is related to the nature of the underlying ocular problem, such as refractive anomalies, macular degeneration, or other diseases.