Addressing a larger context of trends shaping and influencing change in the humanities and the cultures of the university, this text follows the Antonio Zampolli Prize Lecture given on 2 July 2014 at U Lausanne, exploring and encouraging the digital humanities' positive role in the process of the humanities' digital self-determination in the digital realm. Considered in this engagement are: the important (and profitably-elusive) process of defining digital humanities; foundational notions of the methodological commons and communities of practice, and the ways in which they originate, are fostered, are engaged, and themselves engage; and the value of an open approach to current and future work on modeling humanistic data and process, in ways that build on these foundations to embrace the communities and constituencies served by the humanities.