In this article, we investigate the epistemological dimensions pertaining to the notion of scale in Digital Humanities (DH). We first echo the growing concerns of digital tools makers who call for separating the notion of complexity from the metaphor of scale frequently used in the DH literature. We then harvest a corpus of 825 DH papers related to the notion of scale and we build a semantic map on top of them to highlight the various ways DH scholars make use of scale in their contributions. By reviewing this map, we show that scale acts as a blurry concept in DH literature along with level used as a sibling. We then argue for distinguishing between level and scale to reconstruct and visualize the complexity of the social sphere. We redefine level and scale as operators of a socio-technical algebra. This algebra aims at increasing our collective capacity to mine digital traces. We then give practical examples of the joint use of level and scale with the phylomemy reconstruction process. We finally introduce GarganText a free text mining software heir of de Rosnay's Macroscope. We explain how GarganText embeds our definitions of level and scale considering mathematical foundations, programming technologies and design principles.