Introduction to the community

The NASA community is an organization that develops technology that can be used in

many different areas. They work in space exploration as well as making their technology usable

and relevant with normal everyday jobs. They scan earth to give reports on weather damage,

disease outbreaks, and upcoming weather patterns; all this to complete their vision to reach new

heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind (NASA, 2017). The webpage is

available to just about everybody, from the general public to other organizations that want to see

the research and technology that Nasa is developing. The only restrictions of this specific text

would be that it is online and requires a phone or computer with internet access in order to view

it.

In NASA all types of literacy and rhetoric are used. This paper will look at the NASA

web page as a source of rhetoric and narratives, showing where and how they use narratives to

give information. The analytics of for this topic include examining how information is shared in

a narrative, how a narrative is formed, what makes the NASA web page a narrative, and how

arguments are present in a narrative. These analytics will be explained using the NASA webpage

to show how information can be analyzed differently by seeing it as a narrative.

Introduction to the Text

The NASA webpage is considered a narrative because it has news articles that NASAs

rhetors, astronomers, scientists, etc., post regularly. This timeline that it creates is a narrative of

their research and progress that the organization makes. This fits into the definition of a narrative

being a series of events told in chronological order. Each article they post onto their website also

has its individual narrative that contributes to the overall timeline of events and research that
they find. These narratives each have their own way of conveying information. The information

each article provides is determined by the author of the individual article, but the editors for the

website determine where the articles end up based on the type of article it is. For instance, there

are many tabs on the main page, each of which have subtabs which break articles down into

further detail. Some subtopics they break it down into include. They have a featured list as most

websites do on the home page where one can see the biggest updates to NASA, as well as other

tabs like education, history, and about.

A specific text they have on the NASA website is a brief biography of Dick Gordon. This

works as a narrative as it tells a story of events in chronological order (group poster). It can also

be analyzed with rhetorical situation, which is a way of analyzing a paper through ways of

knowing, one of which is through narratives (Downs,2017). The rhetors for this article include

Steve Fox, the editor for the paper, and Brian Dunbar the editor for the page of the website. The

audience for this article would be anyone who was curious enough about Dick Gordon to click

on the link and read the article, this could be students, scientists, or other people of the public.

The exigence of this article is to give people a little bit of insight into the life of Dick Gordon and

to look at everything he was able to accomplish. He accomplished many things such as being the

command pilot of Apollo 12 and receiving the ambassador of exploration award. He constraints

to get this article include internet and a device that can access it such as a computer or phone.

This limits the number of people that can see it and how they must manage the article.

(NASA,2017)

Methods

The concept of narratives itself is not very complicated. Starting out I made a quick

outline of where I might bring this and what topics I would likely have to cover, then I brought
any questions I had after doing that to my peers so that they could correct me if the outline was

out of focus of the main objective. The main objective being to explain what narratives does for

Nasa as a community and in their texts. Most of the time was taken writing and looking at the

rubric and Nasas website to make sure everything was staying on track. The concept of

narratives was defined as a chronological telling or retelling of events, and along with this

definition, the original group provided the analytics that came with the concept narratives. The

majority of the information that I found was taken from the original groups poster and handout,

and since the group provided definitions and analytics the process mostly involved fitting those

analytics with Nasa as a community and in their texts. I was able to observe their argument that

made Professor Piersons PowerPoint a possible narrative and convert that into how Nasa and

their website could also then be considered a narrative, and what this could possibly do to Nasa.

The only difference in this case would be that instead of slides that explain the timeline for a

class it is a collection of online articles explaining cosmic events and new technologies. There

were no issues in understanding the topic so much as knowing exactly what each section

required, and completing that section accordingly.

Analysis and Findings

To go about finding the analytics I looked at the poster that was presented which

explained the analytics for narratives. This included how information is conveyed in a narrative,

how a narrative is formed, and how argument is used in a narrative. The group that presented this

topic had many sources one of which was from Soetaert where they had found this information.

In that they had analyzed a television series and similar to how they analyzed that for rhetoric I

analyzed NASA for narratives (Soetaert,2017).

 The most relevant of these analytics was how information was shared in NASA, so I

looked to see how the information NASA shared had aspects of a narrative in them. They have

many articles, and there are some that are very similar to the Dick Gordons article in that they

will tell a sequence of events related to an important person in the field or on specific topics of

research that they have done. I took the article telling the story of Dick Gordons life and

analyzed it through the analytics presented by the group. This was done by reading through the

story of Gordons life and seeing the information the rhetors shared.

This article it was kept very factual with very little opinion. Usually with narratives it

tends to be only one side of a story being told, so for this article the side of the story being told is

from a person who is in a similar field he was in. It is also writing more academically about him

and what he did for space exploration. Another side of this story could be if a family member

was writing about him. They would have similar information but the story of his life that the

rhetor decides to share would be very different.

The other analytic included how a narrative is formed, which simply is just determined

by the flow of the text and if there is a story being told. In this case the story being told was that

of Dick Gordon and what he did in his time.

While I did not focus on how narratives are formed and how arguments are used, they do

play a part in showing how NASA can be examined as a narrative and how more information can

be gained by doing this. It just so happened that the story of Dick Gordon did not have much

information that was argumentative, and it was already telling a story.

Discussion and meaning

Narratives will be used to share information in NASA and can be helpful in examining

that information by telling it as a story which allows audiences to better understand and learn

what NASA does and will do. By forming their research as a narrative, the rhetors at NASA can

reach out to the public in a way that allows them to better understand where this new information

comes from and where it might be going. It is also done in a way very familiar to all people. By

sharing information as a narrative NASA makes their articles more effective at explaining their

research to people.
 Works Cited

Fox, S. (2017). Remembering Dick Gordon. NASA.gov.

Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/astronautprofiles/gordon

Soetaert, R. (2017). Rhetoric, narrative and management. Learning from Mad Men.

Retrieved from

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315515041_Rhetoric_narrative_and_manageme

nt_Learning_from_Mad_Men

Downs, D. (2017). Rhetoric: making sense of human interaction and meaning-making. In

Wardel, E. and Downs D. Writing and Writing a college reader. Boston: Bedford/St.

Martins.