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Boden Marco

Professor Orozco

ENC 1102

7 April 2024

Research Proposal

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.

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. This asks the question, does the 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?

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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 if NASA is doing a good job of getting people

involved in space and space-related activities. 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 which is needed to keep NASA funded and

allow them to continue their projects.

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

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). 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
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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.

The operations for this research are to first look over the literature if multimodality and

hypermodality can increase engagement for the website. The literature relating to the subject all

show data that there is an increase in engagement with pictures and other multimodal elements.

Seeing that they do, next is to look at NASA’s website and see if there could be an improvement

and since it could be improved, the result suggests that NASA should add more multimodality or

hypermodality to make their website better.

After conducting all of this research, there will most likely be suggestions for subsequent

research. Some research might be done 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. The results could contribute to

their being an effort to increase access to space-related activities for people in lower social and

economic classes because despite how well NASA makes its website people in lower social and

economic may have the inability to get involved essentially meaning that their website design is
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useless to them. People in the “real world” may see an increase in multimodality texts with

results showing that NASA could do a better job using multimodality to get people involved with

space.

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 wants can make

its website more engaging for users and that multimodality can be used anywhere to get more

people engaged in a subject.

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Works Cited

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.