What are digital gardens?

At work a few months ago, I mentioned the concept of digital gardens on a call. Not everyone knew what digital gardens were, and the term means different things to different people using it, so I put together a P2 about what I think a “digital garden” is.

What is a digital garden?

A collection of thoughts, ideas, highlights, annotations, quotes, summaries, and notes that are richer than a tweet, but lack the timestamped nature of a blog post or published essay.

Digital gardens are tended to and evolve over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they get trimmed back. Though they change, they have the four-dimensional permanence of a river or Theseus’s Ship.

A digital garden embodies the nature of working in public and learning out loud: Sharing your current understanding and allowing others to learn from it.

Like entangled roots and interwoven vines, the individual plants of digital gardens form a latticework of bi-directionally linked content that supports and encourages bridging and pollination to further understanding.

to link, annotate, change, summarize, copy, and share — these are the verbs of gardening
Mike Caulfield in The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

Where is this term from?

I first started noticing people I follow talking about it in April of this year: Maggie Appleton, Tom Critchlow, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Venkatesh Rao, Andy Matuschak, Anna Gát, and Joel Hooks.

Maggie Appleton found the earliest use of the term, which harkens back to the old school web: Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

It is similar to a commonplace book, another popular term on the IndieWeb. A Zettlekasten comes to mind, too.

Essays to check out

Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens by Tom Critchlow

My blog is a digital garden, not a blog by Joel Hooks

The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield (a WP.com site!)

How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy

You and your mind garden by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Commonly used tools

TiddlyWiki

Roam

Hypothesis for annotating

Gatsby Brain Theme

Simply Jekyll theme

Quotebacks for quoting

Further reading: A collection of tools, digital gardeners, and notes on Github.

Some thoughts, digital garden-style

Web technology enables some cool things:

Version control allows users ability to see how digital artifacts change over time.

Bi-directional linking brings the Wikipedia-style wormhole exploration to other websites, increasing the scope of knowledge exploration.

WordPress’s trackbacks and pingbacks are a great start to bi-directional linking. Webmentions are another. Category-style taxonomy pages need to get added to the mix, too.

Live preview of links (transclusion) on hover or focus

Linked footnotes and sidenotes with references

Highlighting and sharing/reblogging/regardening of other content and notification with trackbacks, webmentions, and pingbacks.

Hierarchical post types for hierarchical content, tagging for non-hierarchical content

Links to relevant related content by search indexing

Real-time glossaries for slang and jargon

P2tenberg (the block-based comment editor built into P2) is awesome for front-end editing and is likely crucial to any digital garden built on WordPress.

Public wikis are digital gardens of sorts, but build to be highly collaborative, whereas digital gardening is more of a personal endeavor, or at least relatively small groups.

Imagine if we applied Edward Tufte’s principles in a web-first way, rather than just porting his style guide to CSS.