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Communities of practice (CoPs) play a crucial role in cross-pollination and learning within various skill-based and craft domains. These communities often share common materials, concepts, and techniques across related practices. However, due to their insular nature, exchanging knowledge between CoPs has been challenging, leading to fragmented knowledge marked by differing vocabularies and contexts. To address this issue, we introduce Anther, a system designed to highlight shared concepts and semantic overlap between distinct CoPs. Anther projects concepts onto a 2-dimensional space, providing users with comprehensive, contextual, and conceptual views. We conducted a user study, demonstrating Anther’s effectiveness in aggregating and disseminating community-based knowledge, bridging gaps between CoPs, and supporting the cross-pollination of knowledge between CoPs. Further, we present interaction vignettes that illustrate how Anther can ease entry into new domains and aide in discovering new creative techniques. This work can benefit maker communities by fostering collaborative knowledge-building across diverse domains. 

Within various creative domains, communities of practice (CoPs) are instrumental in fostering knowledge creation and innovation. Although each community disseminates knowledge through resources like online video tutorials, this content is often hidden behind different contexts and semantics that limits practitioners’ ability to learn, borrow, and adapt knowledge from each other. To trace how knowledge disseminates across CoPs, we analyzed video transcripts across 25 communities and characterized them using Term Frequency Proportional Document Frequency (TF*PDF) to extracted materials, tools, and techniques concepts. Using a cluster heatmap visualization, we reveal material and material parallels as boundaries for umbrella CoPs, techniques as strong predictors of kindred CoPs, and outliers as emerging sites of hybrid CoPs. We discuss implications for the design of knowledge discovery support tools to characterize material workflows, track knowledge evolution, and develop semantic vocabularies.