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Chapter 120qualities and techniques convey specific meanings of reality and is applied to examine the use of visualisations to convey specific meanings of a sociophysical reality. A frame in a visualisation is a graphical capture of the essence of an issue or event that makes it easier to understand and remember (Rodriguez & Dimitrova, 2011, p. 51). In policy controversies, storylines and frames are worthy of attention because actors use them to negotiate the meaning of an issue, gain support and credibility or challenge competing discourses (Metze & Dodge, 2016).To effectively analyse visual narratives, attention should be paid to the textual context within which they are used (Bleiker, 2018; Doerr & Milman, 2014; Rodriguez & Dimitrova, 2011; Rose, 2016, p. 121) to the extent that visualisations and text can be seen as constructing a single narrative, namely an image–text storyline. The concept image–text storyline, aided by the multimodal approach (see Kress, 2001, 2010), considers visualisations and text as constructing a single multimodal storyline. It integrates visual and textual elements to reveal various ways actors understand an issue while acknowledging that information communicated about the issue, especially online, is often multimodal (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2021).As objects constructing narratives, visualisations have the ability to form online publics, loose networks of actors that are organised around issues they are affected by (Marres & Rogers, 2005, p. 929). Online publics ‘may disclose the work of articulation and organization – the formatting of issues, the mobilization of actors and the preparation of events – that enables and/or announces a public’s eventual “coming out”’ (Marres & Rogers, 2005, p. 928). In an online policy controversy, online publics may form discourse coalitions – loose networks of actors who share a way of interpreting the policy issue (Metze & Dodge, 2016). Online publics, however, may also form other types of coalitions in an online controversy. In this thesis, acknowledging the ‘networkedness’ of visualisations – the idea that online visual content is networked (Niederer, 2018; Niederer & Colombo, 2019) – I expand the notion of online publics by considering both words and visuals as means of forming online publics, and I put the two means one against the other. Hence, the second sub-question is:How do coalitions in a policy controversy use visual and textual narratives?Efrat.indd 20 19-09-2023 09:47