Linking Communities of Practice

The term community of practice (CoP) has been applied to segments of work in the digital humanities in numerous ways over the years: as library training initiatives (Green 2014), as work around a specific encoding practice (Flanders and Jannidis 2015), and even to the DH community as a whole (Siemens 2016). This term, coined in 1991, was originally applied to learning, which the authors claimed was a “sociocultural practice” (Lave and Wenger). It has been further developed by Wenger (2011), who defines it as follows: “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.” In this panel, we use this latter definition as a framework for reflecting on the first year of work in the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) Project