We report on the experience of creating a socially networked system, the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE), for representing knowledge in the form of relationships between people, documents, and groups. Developed as an intercampus, interdisciplinary project of the University of California, this work reflects on a collaboration between scholars in the humanities, software engineering, and information studies by providing an opportunity not only to synthesize different disciplinary perspectives, but also to interrogate and challenge the assumptions each brings to team-based design projects in the digital humanities. This work examines socially networked knowledge as both content and methodology for collaboration, calling for further critique and future investigation of epistemological questions in models of social networks. (Contains 6 notes and 2 figures.)