ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of the shift for the research methods, for the tools of scholarship, and for understanding of the relationship between the models and the theories of the world. It considers in more detail what the digital turn has done for modeling approaches in the humanities and digital humanities. From the perspective of the digital humanities, that tradition appears in retrospect like important prehistory for an understanding of data modeling. Digital scholarly editions emerged so early in the history of humanities computing in part because they were able to build on a clear existing model deriving from a long-standing tradition of practice. The conceptual shift that digital humanities bring to the humanities is more visible or consequential than in the opportunity to formalize and exploit information models. Humanities scholarship already makes extensive use of structured information: the digital medium adds several important dimensions to this structuring.
