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Chapter 5108to give meaning to phenomena in the world, to make sense of the world (Hajer, 1995). They are ‘condensed statement[s] summarizing complex narratives, used by people as “short-hand” in discussions’ (Hajer, 2006, p. 69). Storylines often include written or spoken linguistic elements (Fletcher, 2009; Hajer, 1995) and visual elements (Gommeh et al., 2021; Metze, 2020). The two modes, the verbal and the visual, have different effects (Kress, 2001). However, they do not work independently of each other, as most public communication is, rather, multimodal (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2021). This is even truer in digital communication, which integrates most forms of cultural expression (Castells, 2010). Hence, to reveal the complete story, the visual and the text should be viewed as contributing together to a coherent whole (Kress, 2001, 2010).In summary, the circulation of digital visualisations occurs within or across platforms and can be across topical contexts. During circulation, the meaning carried by a visualisation can change. This meaning is reflected in the tone of the text accompanying the visualisation and the image–text storylines narrated.5.3 MethodsThe novel method used in this study reflects the recent scholarly preference to integrate automated quantitative methods with manual qualitative analysis (e.g., Kermani & Tafreshi, 2022; McSwiney et al., 2021). Below, we describe the steps of the method, which are elaborated in detail in Annex C.To study the circulation of visualisations on Twitter, we gathered, using Twitter API, tweets about nanotechnology in food that contain images (n=4761). In the most retweeted tweets (RT metrics>10; n=90), we analysed, inductively and based on the visual and the text together, the tone towards nanotechnology in food, as conveyed by the tweet’s wording and the storylines narrated. Next, to study cross-platform and cross-topical context circulation, we extracted the visualisations (n=104) from the tweets and, using Google reverse image search, we labelled visualisations that had more than 200 Google reverse image search results (n=14) as visualisations circulated frequently on the open Web. The text of all the URLs on which these visualisations appear (n=667) was analysed to reveal the topical context – the page’s main topic – and whether nanotechnology in Efrat.indd 108 19-09-2023 09:47