The TEI community has long been a beacon of exemplary digital humanities methods, providing flexible and evolving guidelines for digital textual scholarship grounded in standards and a long view of data. Complementary initiatives have emerged from the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) and the research data management (RDM) communities alongside growing awareness of the challenges of persisting online resources, not to mention the devolution of the larger information environment. As a consequence, an ecosystem is emerging that promises unprecedented levels of data interoperability, portability, and scalability based on meaningful connections among different types of data across diverse locations.

This talk explores the role of semantic encoding within an expanding ecosystem based on connectivity and relationality, reflecting on infrastructural possibilities and challenges through the Linked Editing Academic Framework with its emphasis on collaboration and data linking. The TEI community can contribute vitally to a trustworthy ecosystem that not only resists but also offers an alternative to extractive capitalist modes of knowledge production and circulation, and in so doing showcase the power of semantic technologies and tools connected through standards.