From Semiotics to Multilingualism: A Critical Review of Modelling Between Digital and Humanities and Its Potentials for Extending Knowledge Infrastructures

This essay offers a comprehensive critical review of Modelling Between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice (Ciula, Eide, Marras, & Sahle, 2023). The book seeks to reposition modelling in Digital Humanities (DH) away from a narrowly technical conception and toward a humanistic practice of meaning-making grounded in pragmatics, metaphor, semiotics, and media transformation. Its most significant contribution lies in integrating Peircean semiotics and advocating pluralist, non-hierarchical approaches to modelling, exemplified by the “Text Wheel.” Yet the book suffers from uneven structure, redundancies, and an emphasis on description over generative methodology. It frames knowledge largely in consequentialist terms, as emerging from modelling—without developing modelling as a co-creative practice of knowledge production. Translation appears primarily as metaphorical transformation rather than a co-equal epistemic act, and multilingualism is left largely unaddressed, despite being a natural extension of the framework. A fleeting reference to a middle-out approach hints at infrastructural possibilities, but the concept is not developed. This review reconstructs the book’s conceptual framework, evaluates its strengths and limitations, and situates it in relation to broader debates in DH and the philosophy of modelling. It concludes that while the book does not deliver a fully generative framework, it provides indispensable conceptual resources for rethinking modelling as a semiotic, pluralist, and human-centered practice, and it highlights directions—translation, multilingualism, and semi-structuralism—that could extend its vision and support future developments such as a language-agnostic knowledge system. This is a part of my fellowship at the Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and History of Ideas (ILIESI) at the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) supported by OPERA TNA program on September 2025.