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Working Definition:
Scripts are the general pattern of behavior that structures routine socio-cultural practices.
Disciplinary Definitions:
The notion that we build virtual worlds in our minds by assembling remembered experiences and re-assembling them to map onto present experiences has a lengthy history.
At one juncture in this history (1977), Roger Schank and Robert Abelson published Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, a work on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Psychology. Schank refined his conception of a script as a “knowledge structure” in Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and Learning In Computers And People (1982). As is clear from his subtitle, he was working in the “minds are like computers” tradition. In subsequent publications (Tell Me a Story (1990) and Dynamic Memory Revisited 1999, he took a more psychological view and linked the concept of a script to that of a story
According to Schank and Abelson (Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding) we can invoke a large number of scripts, that is, “generalized knowledge structures pertaining to routine, frequently encountered situations or events” that allow us to anticipate the course of action and eventual outcomes. (See Ashcraft, Fundamentals of Cognition, 206).
Patricia Harkin gives a succinct account of it in her “Understanding Virtual Experiences by Configuring Them”:
In Shank’s account, persons have general memories of events that become cognitive schema enabling them to navigate particular circumstances. If, for example, I know that the Chicago Transit Authority requires exact change and the fare is $2, I know that I can’t hand the driver a five dollar bill and expect him to give me $3 and a ride to work. Drivers are not allowed to give passengers change. Past experiences help us to navigate unfamiliar ones. If I enter a restaurant where I have never been before, the chances are good that I’ll pick up clues from the décor, the entrance, the ambient lighting, the presence of absence of music (or MUZAK), the way people are dressed, the distance between tables, and so forth, about what kind of restaurant this is, how much it’s likely to cost me, and whether the menu will have a leather cover with gold tassels or be covered in plastic with ketchup stains. (Harkin, "Understanding Virtual Experiences By Configuring Them", [?])
From an artificial intelligence perspective, Routines can also be understood as Schank’s "scripts" or MOPs.Routines can be understood. From a transactional analysis perspective, as "scripts people live" (Steiner, Scripts People Live). They can also be understood in DeCerteau’s sense from the perspective of cultural anthropological as "everyday practices" (de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life ).
Further scripts can be understood as "scripts" in the sense of "film scripts" or "VR scripts."
In Communication Studies, scripts are features of "interpersonal communication."
Scripts are also linked to "habits" as in Bordieu’s sense of the "habitus."[?] Further, they are also linked to "ritual" as performances of acculturation (Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 113-114).
Comments:
From a C-CS perspective,, a script contains inter-linked routines. These cultural practices are embedded in the way that a specific group generally constructs its cognitive map of the world. Cultural practices are everyday routines: these are series of events that form sequences of daily activities such as "going to the Cotton Club."
Some scripts mentioned in the literature are configurations.
As configurations, they have their impact as narrative transforms, in the sense of Propp’s morphology—narrative structures that exist as strings of "functions." (See Ascraft’s adaption of scripts from Schank & Abelson 206). The form in which they are given parallels Propp’s example of how we understand narrative functions.
In this capacity they are "abstract structures" that carry "archetypes" of experience.
Scripts and scenarios: a scenario is a set of scripts not quite forming a story but delineating a situation out of which a story emerges. Scenarios are exigencies dramatized.
Scripts > scenarios > stories. Each is a larger narrative unit encompassing the former.
These “theorems” allow for the following hypotheses: The use of "scripts" in Virtual Harlem can
link students to the Harlem Renaissance by allowing them to identify with everyday routines
that these scripts will be memorable
that these scripts, as everyday cultural practices, will embed the idea of the Harlem Renaissance in a lived present history as a configuration of a cultural past.
They operate as "myths" to live by (McAdams Stories We Live By ) or "equipment for living" (Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form, 253-262).
Notes
In social psychology, scripts are defined as “ways of behaving socially that we learn implicitly from our culture.” This suggests that “scripting” or “configuring” is usually mediated by mythoi or analogs available in the culture. (Aronson, et al., Social Psychology, 477). The authors of Social Psychology suggest that adolescents, date rape studies show, learn sexual scripts that dispose them to believe that women resist sexual advances and therefore that males need to be persistent.
“Roles” are “shared expectations in a group about how particular people are supposed to behave” (Aronson, et. al., 1999, 340). Roles, thus defined, have to be considered a subset of scripts.
Check:
Bourdieu on habitus
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last revised:
June 13, 2007
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