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The Meaning of Circulating Visualisations related to a Policy Controversy10355.1 IntroductionVisualisations are commonly used as a non-verbal form of communication in public debates about political issues (Rojas-Padilla et al., 2022). They are ‘condensed graphical elements depicting realities, knowledge, ideas, or messages capable of packaging cognitive, normative, and emotional information in non-necessarily verbal form’ (Rojas-Padilla et al., 2022, p. 105). Visualisations such as photographs, maps, graphs, and infographics are capable of shifting a debate in a specific direction (Lilleker et al., 2019; Schneider & Nocke, 2014) and influencing decisionmaking and how an issue is governed (Clancy & Clancy, 2016; Metze, 2017, 2018b). Online, they are often accompanied by text. A growing body of literature aims to include the visual dimension when investigating policy controversies online (Allen, 2021; Gommeh et al., 2021, 2022; Metze, 2018b; Rabello et al., 2021; RojasPadilla et al., 2022). This paper adds to this corpus a focus on the circulation of digital visualisations. Visualisations rarely remain where they were produced; rather, they circulate (Rose, 2016). Various disciplines recognize circulating visualisations as a phenomenon worthy of attention. In cultural studies, circulating a visualisation is considered a means of expressing a user’s perception of a politicized issue (Geboers & Van De Wiele, 2020). In policy studies, it is acknowledged that visualisations can circulate and (re)frame a policy topic (Van Beek et al., 2020). Scholars of science and technology studies are concerned with scientific visualisations extracted from their scientific context and used in non-scientific contexts (Burri & Dumit, 2008). This concern is linked with facts packaged in visualisations: visualisations can carry facts when used in a scientific or another specific context, but these facts may change or even not reach the new destination when the visualisation circulates (Merz, 2011; Morgan, 2011). Specific scholarly attention has been given to visualisations circulated on the internet and social media platforms, where visualisation is an everyday practice (Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Niederer, 2018; Pearce et al., 2020) and circulation is an ever-intensifying process (Rose, 2016, p. 288). Prior research on the circulation of digital visualisations focuses on circulating across platforms (D’Andréa & Mintz, 2019) and countries (McSwiney et al., 2021), circulation of memes (Kligler-Vilenchik & Thorson, 2016; Smits & Ros, 2021) and infographics (Amit-Danhi & Shifman, 2018), Efrat.indd 103 19-09-2023 09:47