This dissertation examines the creation of innovative scholarly environments, publications, and resources in the context of a social knowledge creation affordances engendered by digital technologies. It draws on theoretical and praxis-oriented work undertaken as part of the Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL), work that sought to model how a socially aware and interconnected domain of scholarly inquiry might operate. It examines and includes two digital projects that provide a way to interrogate the meaning of social knowledge creation as it relates to early modern studies. These digital projects – A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add. 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network – approach the social in three primary ways: they approach the social as a quality of material textuality, deriving from the editorial theories of D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann; as a type of knowledge work that digital technologies can facilitate; and as a function of consciously designed platforms and tools emerging from the digital humanities. In other words, digital humanities practitioners are uniquely placed to move what has until now been customarily an analytical category and enact or embed it in a practical, applied way. The social is simultaneously a theoretical orientation and a way of designing and making digital tools — an act which in turn embeds such a theoretical framework in the material conditions of knowledge production. Digital humanists have sought to explain and often re-contextualise how knowledge work occurs in the humanities; as such, they form a body of scholarship that undergirds and enriches the present discussion around how the basic tasks of humanities work—research, discovery, analysis, publication, editing—might alter in the age of Web 2.0 and 3.0. Through sustained analysis of A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript (BL Add 17,492) and the Renaissance Knowledge Network, this dissertation argues argues that scholarly communication is shifting from a largely individualistic, single-author system of traditional peer-reviewed publication to a broadly collaborative, socially-invested ecosystem of peer production and public facing digital production. Further, it puts forward the idea that the insights gained from these long-term digital humanities projects – the importance of community investment and maintenance in social knowledge projects, building resources consonant with disciplinary expectations and norms, and the necessity of transparency and consultation in project development – are applicable more widely to shifting norms in scholarly communications. These insights and specific examples may change patters of behaviour that govern how humanities scholars act within a densely interwoven digital humanities. This dissertation is situated at the intersection of digital humanities, early modern studies, and to discussions of humanities knowledge infrastructure. In content it reports on and discusses two major digital humanities projects, putting a number of previous peer-reviewed, collaboratively authored publications in conversation with each other and the field at large. As the introduction discusses, each chapter other than the introduction and conclusion originally stood on its own. Incorporating previously published, peer-reviewed materials from respected journals, as well as grants, white papers, and working group documents, this project represents a departure from the proto-monograph model of dissertation work prevalent in the humanities in the United States and Canada. Each component chapter notes my role as author; for the majority of the included material, I acted as lead author or project manager, coordinating small teams of makers and writers. In form this means that the following intervenes in discussions surrounding graduate training and professionalization. Instead of taking the form of a cohesive monograph, this project is grounded in four years of theory and practice that closely resemble dissertations produced in the natural sciences. / Graduate