Compare methods

	Script Analysis	Actor-Network Theory Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1992	1984
Originator	Madeleine Akrich (with Bruno Latour)	Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law
Type	Material-semiotic analytic method for technological artefacts	Material-semiotic theory and analytic method
Seminal source	Akrich, M. (1992). The de-scription of technical objects. In W. E. Bijker & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society (pp. 205-224). MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262023382	Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199256051
Aliases	De-scription analysis, Technological script analysis, Inscription analysis	ANT analysis, Sociology of translation, Actant-network mapping
Related	4	4
Summary	Script analysis, developed by Madeleine Akrich with Bruno Latour, treats technological artefacts like texts. When designers build a device, they inscribe a 'script' into it—a set of assumptions about who the users will be, what skills and motives they have, and how the world around the device is arranged—and the artefact then prescribes roles and conduct for the people and things it encounters. 'De-scription' is the analyst's method of reading that script back out of the object and comparing the user the designer projected with the user who actually appears, revealing the often invisible politics built into ordinary things.	Actor-Network Theory analysis treats society and technology as a single woven fabric, mapping how heterogeneous human and non-human actors—engineers, scallops, documents, machines, regulators—are linked into networks through a process of translation. Rather than explaining technical outcomes by appeal to pre-given social categories, ANT follows the actors themselves and describes how durable arrangements are assembled, stabilised, and sometimes undone.