In this context, the research gap we identified and attempt to address is the lack of a model, which emphasises the importance of creating a bridge connecting the analogue and digital scholarly practices and, most importantly, underlines the recursive relationship between these scholarly practices and the models and applications reflecting on them. This kind of research falls within what is typically called ’digital humanities’ and which we understand as a community of practices, regardless of their particular materiality. We therefore believe that in order to be able to discuss the ’digital humanities’ in a way that goes beyond simply discussing infrastructure, and so that the aforementioned challenge can be overcome, we need to start from a modelling process that allows for the systematic and theoretically grounded integration of practices of humanist research approaches in both the analogue and digital world. In this paper, we discuss this undertaking and propose a multi-layered model, the SDM, that exemplifies the constituents of our modelling endeavour. For this reason, the SDM is conceived as an explicit but not definite set of constituents of the domain of digital scholarship in the humanities. In his presentations Manfred Thaller has repeatedly stressed, that the controversy of the ’digital humanities’ should rather focus on the scholarly practices in the digital humanities and in particular their prerequisites, the various epistemological implications that the application of digital technology entail, than to be predominated by arguments about labelling (cf. Thaller 2013, 2015a, 2015b; McCarty / Short 2002).