Digital 📀 Gardens 🪴

• Planted  🌱 11 May 2023…
• web,
• learning

Digital gardens are a publishing philosophy for personal knowledge … web-based collections of notes, essays and thoughts that can evolve. Early 👩‍🌾 adoptors, aka ‘gardeners’, were designers and developers using static sites and JavaScript to enhance and explore interesting ideas …

Clearly, digital gardens are more than a single technology or framework. And digital gardening also has a philosophical-ethical aspect as in publishing personal (opposed to walled gardens of social media siloed or otherwise controlled) knowledge online using whichever format works for writers/creators.

Digital designer and anthropologist Maggie Appleton's lovingly tended patch describes the movement as ‘culturally compelling … a practice that treats a personal website as a constantly evolving landscape … The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.’

With historical context, she explains digital gardens as not following the static conventions of blogs presenting finished work in reverse chronological order, but as more ‘work-in-progress wikis’ — collections of evolving ideas explored via contextually linked notes — growing over time.

Probably since Aristotle, and certainly since the 16^th century, thinkers have theorised commonplacing practices linking text with external content, ideas and learning.

The idea of hypertext, itself, began with medieval monks embossing painstakingly crafted hand-written and illuminated codices with textual images (drop caps, Lombardic capitals, historiated initials etc.) which could then be replicated elsewhere in the same document, or even other volumes, as visual cues linking related content and concepts.

1920s discussion by T.S. ‘There is no method except to be very intelligent’ Eliot turned (negatively) horticultural discussing the early hyper textual nature of English literature (even writing poems about other people's poems) …

That literature presents the appearance of a garden unmulched, untrimmed, unweeded, and choked by vegetation sprung only from the chance germination of the seed of last year’s plants. TS Eliot, 1922.

1941 had Jorge Luis Borges describe a labyrinth of paths and directions of alternate realities and infinite texts, multiverses and quantum mechanics in The Garden of Forking Paths with allegories of the human brain. 🧠

During the 1930s and 1940s, Vannevar Bush's work on collective societal memory explored the need to enable people to find information more easily than was possible on paper …

The process of tying two items together is the important thing. Vannevar Bush, 1945

As computing developed following World War II and throughout the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s conceptual hypertext became more and more real, culminating in CERN's Tim Burners-Lee and the World Wide Web changing culture, commerce and technology forever.

1998's Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas saw hypertext writing as the future of computer display dependent content — ideas on how to use new media to 'communicate more effectively and to learn more quickly'.

2015's The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral also detailed how digital gardening isn't about specific tools but rather accumulating personal knowledge and growing in explorable spaces …

A different way to think your online activity, no matter what tool you use … [A] way to explore the internet, they revel in not being the definitive source, just a source. Mike Caulfield

A concern was that we'd been ‘swept away by streams … collapsing information into single-track timelines.’ Which, technologically, can be highly effective (e.g., Twitter) but are unable to ‘accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time’ as a digital garden.

By 2018 online presences were looking to reinvent chronological blogs as ‘metaphorical exploratory interlinked gardens.’ Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens suggested more metaphors like campfires as …

Collaborative areas where people write in response to one another. Gardens are about individuals — campfires are conversational spaces to exchange ideas that aren't yet fully formed … [To] weave cohesive narratives around … massive amounts of data … media silos and new interaction models … space to explore how we tell stories … change the stories. Tom Critchlow

In these spaces, comments can add complexity but the written pieces provide the seed which, if tended, can germinate and grow further.

This is my personal digital garden. A wild garden, loosely tended. There's drafts, ideas, partials, fragments and ideas … With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time. Tom Critchlow

My blog is a digital garden, not a blog followed and focussed on the sustainable (not nurtured = not growing) rate of ideas over the instant gratification of googling — curation over chronology — and 'non-perfomative blogging' not focussed on SEO and completeness.

How the Blog Broke the Web identified Moveable Type as the primary effector in the move behind walled content — precursor to Facebook et al.

In 2023, we're still figuring out how to let a thousand small libraries bloom.

Maggie Appleton's 👩🏻‍🏫 Gardening Patterns 🫵

Topography over Timelines

🏡 Organise gardens around contextual relationships & associative links.

📆 Do not make dates the structural basis of navigation.

📝 Connect posts via related themes, topics & context using …

🔗 Bi-directional links with destination & source pages visible …

🏷️ Tags …

🔍 Filtered searches, functionality & indexes …

🗂️ Nested folders …

📉 Graphs and …

🚪 Multiple entrances.

Continuous Growth

📊 Graph of time vs the amount of work — small amounts, regularly.

💪 The site is never finished — there is constant change.

💬 The site is designed to evolve alongside critical thinking.

👩‍🎨 The site is free from Wordpress or Facebook prescription.

Imperfection & Learning in Public

🥑 Elements can be half-written but live Cf. product completeness.

🤪 Weird, quirky.

🪧 Sans publishing strategies or media campaigns.

😊 Intimate & public.

🎳 Non performative.

🤝 Sharing without expertise requires explicit status …

Contextual Iconography

🌱 Seedlings for first-draft, rough ideas …

🌿 Budding for cleaned up & clarified …

🌲 Evergreen for grown/mature work.

Playful, Personal & Experimental

💐 Uniqueness regardless of topic — differing arrangements/plantings.

🤔 Independent thinking — not some platform's.

🤹‍♀️ Presentation outside 240 character or FB 'status' limits.

🧪 Experiment & take risks with web tech, design & development.

Content Diversity (Intercropping)

🪫 Explore complex ideas using technical complexity.

🎺 Connect with other mediums — video, audio etc.

Independent Ownership

🏜️ Work from a patch you own & control.

📜 Old-skool i.e., text foundations for technical longevity.

🌳 Think about long-term growth.

Limitations of Gardening & Related Activities 🫵

Things don't have to grow in a garden to be interesting. And …

Getting lost in your knowledge management system is a fantastic way to avoid creating things. Sasha Chapin

For example, it has been pointed out that many of those writing about note-taking rarely have serious use contexts. Bloggers, life-hackers and the like make 💰 telling others how to better organise journals, commonplacing techniques and how to write/read/learn outside traditional methods.

Most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields … such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous [growing or originating from outside] creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity … most effective readers and thinkers don’t take notes when reading. Andy Matuschak

NB: It's worth noting that Andy's own site can be difficult to use/navigate and that there is supportive research into note-taking and learning.

Counter to Joel Hooks, the oft-referenced Maggie Appleton, critiques Building a Second Brain and also gives helpful advice to those thinking they're not so techno-savy as to work in and explore their own digital garden plots. 👍

Regardless … go bush — give it a go — and grow!

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