Digital Gardening
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A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.
Another characteristic is the navigation: while a blog may usually be explored in chronological order, a digital garden uses bi-directional linking—or at least lots of internal links—to connect notes together. Such interconnection creates a trail of ideas that readers can follow.
Digital gardens are usually light-weight, with an emphasis on the text itself, but they can be designed in any way that reflects their owners’ thinking style and digital gardening preferences. They can be built with intricate systems, or simple no-code tools.
The Garden is an old metaphor associated with hypertext. Those familiar with the history will recognize this. The Garden of Forking Paths from the mid-20th century. The concept of the Wiki Gardener from the 1990s. Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.
The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.
Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.
Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number . It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.
Digital gardening is part of the pushback against the limited range of vanilla web formats and layouts we now for granted.
A digital garden is a place that makes it possible to make connections between all of the things that you are consuming.
creating a digital garden to end my doomscrolling – YouTube
Further Reading
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