ABSTRACT
The humanities, the sociology of knowledge, cultural studies, hermeneutics, even big data statistics, all address different aspects of text and talk. Within communication research, several methods have been developed that shed light on the media in which the substance of discourses is disseminated; for example, conversation, content, rhetorical, discourse, and media analysis. In the writing of Michel Foucault, who proposed rules and practices that govern the use of language in different historical eras, discourse has become an overarching system of representation. Mathematics is a discourse that explores proofs within well-defined formalisms, independent of what other discourse communities may do with them. In scientific discourses, institutionalization begins with formal education as a path to membership. It continues in the form of handbooks, regularly appearing publications, standardized methodologies, entitlements of earned degrees, and specialized infrastructures. Members of different discourse communities may well speak the same natural language without being able to understand each other’s discourse.
