Extant scholarship in organizational science explains the conditions under which organizational actors adopt established institutional practices. Organizational scientists have been less successful in explaining the origins of institutional practices; addressing that lacunae is the focus of my research. Specifically, this study examines the emergence of novel institutional practices or the process of proto-institutionalization as a complex social process that occurs both through face-to-face and virtual interaction among numerous, disparate organizational actors. Accordingly, I introduce a novel theoretical construct – the digital field – to explain how information technologies facilitate proto-institutionalization. To map the digital field, I use a web crawler to collect a sample of websites from the digital field of computer science education. Social network analysis examines the structure of the digital field. To contextualize the findings from the network analysis, I conduct interviews with organizational leaders of DiverseCS, a non-profit organization that aims to increase the representation of women and racial/ethnic minorities in computer science education. I find that organizational leaders pursue three strategies of action to enable the emergence of proto-institutions in a digital context: 1) building a coherent organizational identity, 2) engaging in network brokerage, and 3) constructing organizational narratives. Together, a mixed methods approach provides a lens to understand the macro-level and micro-level connections and complexity in a digital field during proto-institutionalization. This study, therefore, holds important implications both for organizational science and also management practitioners.