DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, is committed to advancing the digital revolution that has captured the arts and humanities. As more legacy primary and secondary sources become digital, more digital content is being produced and more digital tools are being deployed, we see a next generation of digitally aware scholars in the humanities emerge. DARIAH aims to connect these resources, tools and scholars, ensuring that the state-of-the-art in research is sustained and integrated across European countries. To do so, it is important to understand the actual role that proper data modelling and standards could play to make digital content sustainable. Even if it does not seem obvious at first sight that the arts and humanities would be fit for taking up the technological prerequisites of standardisation, we want to show in this paper that we can and should integrate standardisation issues at the core of our DARIAH infrastructural work. This analysis may lead us to a wider understanding of the role of scholars within a digital infrastructure and consequently on how DARIAH could better integrate a variety of research communities in the arts and humanities.