Abstract Recent work on scale, chronotope and scale-making offers exciting ways for rethinking what we often refer to as “context”. In this paper, we review these ideas pointing to how we might reconcile some of the overlaps in the concepts of scale and chronotope, while examining how we might look at chronotopic connection across quite different empirical divides drawn from a number of separate research projects in Indonesia. We propose that scale can be thought of as chains of chronotopes and that the semiotic forms that connect them as scale-makers, thus helping relate these two concepts to that of scale-making.