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Chapter 116Interpretive research starts with a puzzle and offers interpretations that make sense of it (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012, p. 28). Hence, in this thesis, I start with a puzzle about visualisations as powerful meaning-makers in policy controversies. By interpreting them, my aim is not to reveal any ‘truth’ about what visualisations represent (such a ‘truth’ might be, for example, that a specific technology is good for society), but rather I interpret visualisations to explicate their power as meaningmakers and do that while acknowledging that what they represent could mean different things for different people.The conceptual framework I developed is based on the idea that to fully understand the making of meaning by visualisations in a policy controversy, this meaning-making can be analysed from three perspectives of the visualisation: (1) the type and content, (2) the narrative it conveys and (3) its circulation. These three perspectives, or aspects, which are both static and dynamic, collectively form the overall meaning of the visualisation. The aspects are not independent, but interact to create a composite meaning (Figure 1.1). In the remainder of this section, I elaborate on these three aspects and the three approaches to the study of visualisations’ meaning-making they are based, namely approaches that pay attention to (a) stages of meaning-making, (b) layers of meaning-making and (c) the process of meaning-making. Together with the elaboration on the three aspects of meaning-making which compose my conceptual framework, I introduce the research sub-questions, each derived from one aspect.Figure 1.1. Three aspects of visualisations’ meaning-makingEfrat.indd 16 19-09-2023 09:47