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Boden Marco

Professor Orozco

ENC 1102

22 April 2024

Research Project

Introduction

NASA has one major problem and that is it is a government-run organization. Due to

NASA being a government-run organization it relies on public support to continue on projects

and funding (Foust). Without public interest and engagement NASA has limits on what it can do

and NASA must stay funded because 69% of Americans believe that it is essential for the U.S. to

be a leader in space exploration (Tyson). The problem is that only around half of the American

population have at least engaged once in a space-related activity throughout the previous year.

Space-related activities include looking at images or pictures taken through a telescope, seeing

an astronomical event like an eclipse or meteor shower, watching a space launch, or visiting a

space museum or planetarium (Tyson). This means that 50% of the American population hasn’t

even done one of these things throughout the entirety of the year. All it takes is going to a

website like NASA’s and looking at a picture of space. NASA even has a specific section of their

website where they post an astronomy picture of the day. If people aren’t engaged or interested

in space-related activities, then NASA won't get funding or permission to continue on their

projects meaning that NASA needs to do everything they can to make sure people get engaged in

space-related activities starting with their website (Foust). This asks the question, does the
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Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) section of NASA’s website do a good job engaging,

informing, and getting Americans interested in space and space-related events?

NASA has a website where they can show off space-related things, but does it do a good

job engaging, informing, and getting Americans interested in space and space-related events?

Using Jenae Cohn’s methods of understanding visual rhetoric and analyzing the effect of

multimodality, the presentation of information using forms other than text like pictures or audio,

and hypermodality, the use of hyperlinks in a paper, from the works of Taejan Lee, Carmen

Daniela Maier, and Meng Zhaoyao, it can be seen that NASA is not doing a good job of getting

people involved in space and space-related activities using the astronomy picture of the day

section of their website. This is all very important because while only 50% of Americans engage

in a single space-related activity throughout the year, 70% of Americans believe that the United

States should be a global leader in space exploration (Tyson). Even though most Americans

believe that the United States needs to be a leader in space exploration, not many actually engage

in space-related activities that are needed to keep NASA funded and allow them to continue their

project.

The authors in all the literature that relates to the use of multimodality all agree that

multimodality will increase engagement and information perceived within a form of writing

(Lee). Lee says that papers that use text-only have a higher chance of causing the reader to have

an information overload, the inability for someone to process any more information (6). Maier

states something similar in her research stating that using hypermodality and multimodality can

be used to increase engagement within a form of writing (196). In Zhaoyao's writing, he states

that pictures and videos are used to help get students to get engaged and encourage learning

(355). This is important because pictures can be used to encourage people to learn about new
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things. In Cohn’s work, she talks about what effect lines, colors, shapes, sizes, spaces, values,

and textures have on websites and how they are used to attract attention (26-34). All authors who

researched the subject agree that all text forms of writing would be more engaging and

informative if multimodality was used. The two pieces of literature that relate to Americans'

engagement in space talk about why public engagement is needed for NASA but Foust says “The

lesson from all this is not that NASA and its supporters need to spend even more effort on public

outreach, or that they should give it up all together. Instead, it may be that broad public support

isn’t the missing ingredient to a bigger, bolder civil space program.” This means that there is a

disagreement because Foust believes that there are other ways to keep NASA running. The main

argument for the use of multimodality being beneficial is the most valid because all the data

proves that it is, and all the authors agree on it. For the argument about NASA needing public

support, they do need public support because while one author may believe there is another

solution to NASA surviving without public support, both agree that public support and

engagement would ultimately keep NASA running. Using the literature and their arguments,

there can be a study on whether or not NASA does a good job making its website engage users in

space-related topics and its importance due to NASA's reliance on public engagement.

Methods

After wondering if the NASA Astronomy Picture of Day did a good job engaging,

informing, and getting Americans interested in space and space-related events, I decided to find

out for myself. I started by going onto the Astronomy Picture of the Day section of NASA’s

website and took five pictures of the website so I could code them. Once I took a bunch of

pictures, I started off by putting them all on a giant list in a Word document. After, I made a
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chart in Word so I could accurately code all the pictures in my list. The codes I used to separate

my picture were pictures of the website that looked messy and unengaging, pictures of the

website that looked a little messy but could be fixed, and pictures of the website that looked

clean and organized. Once I had my sources coded and organized, I made sub-categories for the

messy and unengaging code. For the messy and unengaging code, the sub-codes were, messy and

unengaging due to lack of visual design elements and the other subcode was messy and

unengaging due to a lack of pictures or multimodality. I was able to look at the pictures and how

they were categorized and form an argument related to how good the Astronomy Picture of the

Day section is on NASA’s website.

Results
Figure 1 Astronomy Picture of the Day
Looking at the first picture, I coded this into a little

messy but could-be-fixed code. This image does not

have lots of visual design elements such as size, lines,

shapes, and colors. It does have elements such as

multimodality and hypermodality to help with the

engagement on the website which is why I coded it

Figure 2 Astronomy Picture of the Day

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into the a little messy but could be fixed category. For the second picture, I coded it into the

messy and unengaging category and then the messy and unengaging due to a lack of pictures or

multimodality subcode. Looking at this picture, it has no multimodality and no pictures which

makes it unengaging but it has some visual elements and lacks others like different sizes, shapes,

and textures. For the third picture, I put it under the a little messy but could-be-fixed code. This

Figure 3 Astronomy Picture of the Day

picture does have engaging elements like multimodality and hypermodality but also lacks

different sizes, colors, and lines which make the page a little messy. For the fourth picture, I

Figure 4 Astronomy Picture of the Day

coded it into the messy and unengaging category and it fit under both subcodes. This picture is

unengaging because it lacks engaging elements such as multimodality and pictures. There are

also little visual elements such as lines, sizes, colors, and shapes which make this little part of the
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website look unorganized.

For the final picture, I

coded this into a little

messy but could-be-fixed

code. In this picture, there

were multimodality and

Figure 5 Astronomy Picture of the Day hypermodality aspects that

would help with engagement but also lacked the visual design elements like sizes and color to

make it look clean and organized. While looking at my coded pictures, I noticed that none of

them fit under the clean and organized subcode, three of them fit under a little messy but could-

be-fixed code, and two of them fit into the messy and unengaging code.

Discussion

NASA is a government organization which leads to the reliance on public engagement to

receive funding and approval to work on projects. Without public approval, NASA won't be able

to do the things that it needs to do because the majority of Americans believe that it is crucial for

the United States to be a leader in space despite not engaging in it for themselves (Tyson). With

American engagement in space being so important, NASA can easily look to improve it by

making sure the Astronomy Picture of the Day section of their website is engaging, informing,

and getting Americans interested in space and space-related events. After looking at the primary

data coded, it is easy to conclude that NASA does not make the Astronomy Picture of the Day

section of its website engaging, or informing, and does not get Americans interested in space and

space-related events. All the primary data was coded as messy and a lot of it also being
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unengaging meaning that the Astronomy Picture of the Day part of the website could be made

better to attract more people to get them involved in space-related activities and that will in turn

ensure that NASA gets the funding they need so they continue being a leader in space.

Conclusion

NASA relies a lot on public engagement and the easiest way to get public engagement up

is through the use of their website. The purpose of this study was to see if NASA does a good job

of making its website engaging for people to use. Using the literature relating the use of

multimodality, hypermodality, and visual rhetoric, it can be seen what makes a website engaging

and keeps people interested in the website. With this, it can be seen that NASA does not make

the Astronomy Picture of the Day part of its website engaging for users and that multimodality

can be used more to get more people engaged in a subject. There could be follow-up research

regarding the engagement of space-related activities and whether the low engagement is due to

reasons like members of lower classes having an inability to get engaged or just reasons for low

engagement in general. Other data that could have been used is data from another section of the

NASA website and it differs from the Astronomy Picture of the Day section. Overall there is lots

of research that can be added to this but these findings show that NASA does not do a good job

on its Astronomy Picture of the Day section of the website.

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Works Cited

Astronomy Picture of the Day. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html. Accessed 22 Apr. 2024.

Cohn, Jenae. Understanding Visual Rhetoric – Writing Spaces. https://writingspaces.org/past-

volumes/understanding-visual-rhetoric/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2024.

Foust, Jeff. The Space Review: The Value of Public Interest in Spaceflight.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4625/1. Accessed 31 Jan. 2024.

Lee, Taejun (David), et al. “Are Pictures Worth a Thousand Words? The Effect of Information

Presentation Type on Citizen Perceptions of Government Websites.” Government

Information Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 3, July 2020, p. 101482. ScienceDirect,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2020.101482

Maier, Carmen Daniela, and Jan Engberg. “Harvard Business Review’s Reframing of Digital

Communication: From Professional Expertise to Practical Guidance.” Journal of

Pragmatics, vol. 176, Apr. 2021, pp. 186–97. ScienceDirect,

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.02.005.

Tyson, Brian Kennedy and Alec. “Americans’ Views of Space: U.S. Role, NASA Priorities and

Impact of Private Companies.” Pew Research Center Science & Society, 20 July 2023,

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/07/20/americans-views-of-space-u-s-role-

nasa-priorities-and-impact-of-private-companies/

Zhaoyao, Meng. “Explore Mars from the NASA Website.” Physics Education, vol. 40, no. 4,

July 2005, pp. 355–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-9120/40/4/005.

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