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The Meaning of Circulating Visualisations related to a Policy Controversy1255and negative health concerns, Table 5.4). This conveys a more complex or nuanced message than a single-tone message, for example one about the many benefits of nanotechnology in food but also the risks involved in it. Such a message is perhaps difficult to convey in a compelling way in a tweet’s limited space. Embedding visualisations in a tweet is a way of dealing with Twitter’s extreme space constraints (Boscarino, 2022). Our findings show that, although visualisations add information to the message conveyed through text (for example, by visually illustrating scientific innovations) or support the text (for example, by providing evidence for a claim made in the text), their capability to help deal with Twitter’s space constraints is limited. To gain more insights into the way in which a message is conveyed on various platforms and visualisations’ role in it, further research could use other data-gathering strategies and compare storylines narrated on different platforms with and without the use of visualisations. The findings of the cross-topical context analysis (Table 5.1) show that, on the open Web, visualisations used on Twitter in the context of nanotechnology in food are not unique to the topic and are used in various topical contexts. The topics of URLs discussing nanotechnology in food can be seen as related to nanotechnology in food, directly or indirectly. These topics include, for example, the agri-food sector, miniature tracking chips in food and elsewhere, and GMO. However, visualisations used on Twitter in the context of nanotechnology in food appeared also in URLs that not only do not discuss nanotechnology in food but also whose topic has nothing in common with nanotechnology in food, for example parenting or makeup. Given that an imagery associated with a topic can affect public discourse and contribute to the construction of political narratives (Baker & Walsh, 2020; Pentzold et al., 2019), further research should be directed towards revealing whether there is imagery associated with nanotechnology in food by constructing a visualisations dataset using other methods.When digital visualisations circulate, online content is networked (Niederer, 2018; Niederer & Colombo, 2019). Thus, the fact that two topics are connected by using a shared visualisation can add another dimension to the connection between the topics. Our findings show that the injected tomato visualisation (Table 5.4) is used in the context of both nanofood and GMO. The literature states that, concerning public acceptance, these two topics are connected: nanofood is often analogized to GMO to communicate a fear that it might arouse controversy similar to that Efrat.indd 125 19-09-2023 09:47