This paper presents the findings of research conducted in the EU-funded project Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" type="note" target="n01" n="1">1 </ref> (DM2E), which investigated how the modelling of scholarly practices and research processes might inform the development of research environments for digital scholarship in the humanities. In particular, the <hi xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" rend="italic">Scholarly Domain Model</hi> (SDM) will be presented as a framework for modelling the domain of digital scholarship, which provides the constituents for the systematic enquiry of continuously evolving Virtual Research Environments (VRE) <ref xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" type="note" target="n02" n="2">2 </ref> and the emergence of digital practices and methodology within them. The importance of models and a practice of modelling cannot be overestimated for the creation of research environments that advance beyond a level of infrastructure, and achieve sustainability through the focus on the evolving scholarly practices at the heart of the transition that altered the humanities profoundly in the last decades.