Page 108 - Demo

Chapter 5106on circulation in which visualisations remain intact and we do not include, as van Beek (2020) do, the image itself as an element in the circulation of a visualisation. We define circulation as the process in which an online visualisation is republished, as is, by its audience.5.2.2 Forms of circulatingCirculating within a platformCirculating within a platform, for example by retweeting a tweet containing a visualisation, is often studied using quantitative methods (e.g., counting hashtags, likes, or retweets) that produce network graphs (Niederer, 2018; Rogers, 2021). To study circulating on a specific platform, the platform’s affordance should be considered when the research protocol is being designed (McSwiney et al., 2021; Pearce et al., 2020), and the ways the specific digital traces offered by a platform construct the dataset should be acknowledged (Venturini, Bounegru, et al., 2018).Circulating across platformsCirculating can also occur across platforms (D’Andréa & Mintz, 2019; Hand, 2016), for example when a Twitter user saves a visualisation to her drive and uses it in a blog post or a website. Unlike circulating within a specific platform that has its designated circulation buttons (e.g., retweet, share), circulating across platforms usually requires more clicks. A cross-platform circulation is challenging to study because of the individual social media platforms’ APIs and other data-driven architectures specific to a platform (D’Andréa & Mintz, 2019; Rogers, 2019). Studying cross-platform circulation involves, like cross-platform study in general, balancing the need to design a research protocol specific to a platform with the need to enable comparability between the platforms (Venturini, Bounegru, et al., 2018).Circulating across topical contextsAnother form of circulation can happen within or across platforms and relates to the context in which the visualisation is used. Regarding the circulation of visualisations, context is acknowledged as important. Visualisations can circulate from one context to another, for example when a visualisation is detached from its original scientific context and used in a non-scientific context (Schneider & Nocke, 2014, p. 17) or when a visualisation circulates from a policy document to a news Efrat.indd 106 19-09-2023 09:47