To speak to diverse audiences about how people learn to write and how writing works inside and outside the academy, we must conduct research across geographical, institutional, and cultural contexts as well as research that enables comparison when appropriate. Large-scale empirical research is useful for both of these moves; however, we must consider how writing studies prepares us to conduct such research. Reflecting on our experience, we understand that the important research negotiations that enabled our research to scale can be described through the language of designing, building, and connecting networks. By designing networks, we refer to the moments of imagining and planning the possible shape of a network. By building networks, we refer to making or designing the conditions or support structures needed to achieve a particular network design. Finally, by connecting networks, we refer to realizing the linkages that establish new communicative objects that can move forward and perform some kind of work.