Digital Gardening

Status: 🔸 Seed → 🔸 Growing → 🔸 Well-formed → ✅ Fruitful → 🔸 Retired

What is a digital garden?

Maggie Appleton's essay A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden describes it as "A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web ... A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – the ideas are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete, but are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing."

Origin and tools

One of the originators of the term was Mike Caulfield, who is one of my thought leaders. He delivered a keynote address The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral at the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network. It later became an essay that lays the foundations for our current understanding of digital gardening.

Maggie Appleton's own essay Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks explains how to build a digital garden without touching code. One of the gardening tools she highlights is Obsidian, a private knowledge base that allows you to publish a selection of notes as a public website. As I am already using Obsidian for my second brain, that is how this garden is being produced.

Some good advice

Assumed Audience Maggie Appleton's advice is to include a small informational box at the beginning of a post, to identify the intended audience. That allows one to write for an informed audience without defining every term and qualifying every statement.

Epistemic Disclosure Maggie Appleton recommends providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content.