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Visual and Textual Storylines by Coalitions in a Policy Controversy573Yet, visualizations have the capacity to transcend geographic contexts and create a global community (Campbell, 2007), as the visualization of a flaming faucet did. This visualization, originally a frame from the documentary film Gasland that was produced in the United States, associated drinking water contamination with nearby hydraulic fracturing (also called fracking) (Mazur, 2016; Metze, 2017, 2018b). The visualization travelled from the United States to other countries, and accompanied by other visualizations that reproduced the scene from the film, created a global public of shale gas opponents (Mazur, 2016; Metze, 2018b). In this article, we use the notion of online publics to study discourse coalitions. Hence, the research question of this article is: How do visualizations influence dynamics within a discourse coalition and between competing discourse coalitions in the shale gas controversy?We selected the web spheres associated with the Netherlands, New York State, and South Africa as sites for collecting data. We expected to detect similarities and differences in discourse coalitions in these three ‘internet regions’, as the three shale gas controversies introduce the common aforementioned competing framings but have also site-specific characteristics (see also below). A mixed collection of discourse coalitions enables a better understanding of the (online) global publics in the shale gas controversy and demonstrating the advantages of our framework in a compelling way.The article first presents the conceptual framework. Second, it describes the methods used. Third, it presents empirical examples from our study to illustrate our framework. We end with a discussion and conclusions.3.2 Conceptual framework: discourse coalitions and visualizationsThe first question is: how do discourse coalitions and visualizations relate to each other? Our framework draws on work about discourse coalitions (Bulkeley, 2000; Feindt & Oels, 2005; Hajer, 1995) and the role of the visual in framing and politics (Bleiker, 2017, 2018; Clancy & Clancy, 2016; Doerr, 2017; Hendriks et al., 2017; Van Beek et al., 2020). We address policy controversies as struggles of competing discourse coalitions about the framing of a problem. Framing influences policy, Efrat.indd 57 19-09-2023 09:47