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Chapter 5126aroused by GMOs (Handford et al., 2014; Henchion et al., 2019; Schwarz-Plaschg, 2018). In the context of nanofood, this visualisation is (still) used mostly with positive text and as part of positive storylines, whereas, in the context of GMO, the visualisation is often used with negative text. This observation may be relevant to the discussion about the connection between the two topics, nanofood and GMO.This study suggests, through the in-depth analysis of five selected visualisations, that, although visualisations circulate across topical contexts, within the boundaries of a specific topic their meaning, as reflected in the tone of the text accompanying it, remains mostly stable. Although our number of examples is limited, we still find it worth mentioning that four of the five visualisations, which circulated but stayed mostly within the boundaries of one topical context – natural world collection, smartdust, woman farmer in a cereal field, and plastic pellets on a finger – were mostly accompanied with a single-tone text. Further research could expand the study of meaning and topical-context association by studying more visualisations and more URLs on which they appear.This paper reports three forms of circulating: within a platform, across platforms, and across topical contexts, and links this to changes in textual tone and image–text storylines, over time. By so doing, the paper refines the notion of circulation, thereby allowing a rich and comprehensive empirical picture to be drawn that is unique in its precise way of describing changes of meaning in the digital world.Limitations and recommendations for further researchThe contribution of the innovative conceptual approach and the original method developed in this study are significant. However, the method also has its limitations. Firstly, the method reveals circulation across topical contexts that occurs across platforms and on the open Web, but it does not reveal any crosstopical context circulation on Twitter, as only tweets about nanotechnology in food were gathered. Further research can use the topical contexts revealed here to study – on Twitter – the circulation across topical contexts of visualisations about nanotechnology in food.Secondly, the method relies on Google’s black-boxed algorithm that dictates, possibly in a biased way, the part of the web that is being indexed, which Efrat.indd 126 19-09-2023 09:47