Digital gardens
What is a digital garden? In short, it's a website where someone shares knowledge in development. It's both a personal wiki and a blog, a place where one is wrong publicly and refines their ideas (and pages) over time.
It's a place of discovery where your interests take focus. You learn, write, rest, and then return to learn and write some more. Unlike most traditional "blogs," your entries might change as you grow in your understanding of the things you write about.
You might think of it as your personal note-taking system that is slightly formalized for public view, though not written for a public audience explicitly. People have called it a "second brain" or "digital commonplace book."
I am the audience for my digital garden and I come here to explore ideas and document what I know; however, I'm publishing it to the web to share with others and provide a place for them to explore my ideas, too. I'm here to work on writing skills, iterate, and be vulnerable.
Tools
Every gardener needs tools to build and maintain their plots. The tools you use for your garden may be different than mine. Generally, you'll need some kind of note-taking system and a website/web host to put it online.
My tools:
- Obsidian (note taking software)
- Github (deployment workflow from Obsidian to Netlify that assists in converting the content from Markdown to HTML)
- Netlify (web host)
- Dreamhost (this is where I bought my domain name)
- See Purpose and Guidelines for the full list of tools in my personal knowledge management system (PKMS)
Suggestions from folks who have been doing this longer than I have:
Examples
The Obsidian Garden Gallery provides a list of gardens published online from Obsidian.
Max's brainstorming
This is some brainstorming I did before setting up my digital garden. I thought about how I could tie ideas of real-world gardening and landscaping into this, read about hypertext art/expression, and browsed a bunch of other digital gardens for inspiration.
Garden freestyle:
trees, flowers, paths, lawns, birds & butterflies, weeds, soil, water, rocks, walls, steps, hedges
does my digital garden have walls?
- network of interconnected notes & pages
- non-linear navigation and clear pathways through content
- personal exploration & learning
- frequent updates/revision history
- link to external sources
- appealing design
digital garden - space to cultivate thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, iterative manner (rather than strictly structured)
Ideas:
- paths = structured paths through content
- lawns = patches of related things
- notes from sources (books, podcast episodes, articles, etc)
- 1 per book/thing, write quotes & thoughts
- birds & butterflies - thoughts from external sources
- fragments - loose notes, thoughts, ideas, etc
- 1 per thing
- flowers - ideas that grow when it rains
- synthesis - connections between notes & fragments, reviews of sources, etc - ideally connecting different things and referencing them like in school.
- trees - ideas have taken root
- stage of tree growth = how formulated an idea it is vs scratch notes still
- (like animal crossing)
Purpose and Guidelines
walky.space/digitalgarden
Links
The ObsidianMD subreddit has been a vital source of tips & tricks. My are.na channel (embedded above) includes links to other digital garden sites. Here I'll include articles that have influenced how my garden evolves.
Digital Garden Terms of Service
Link: github.com/max-writes/digital-garden-tos
I have a right to be wrong or incomplete in my Digital Garden, either due to paucity of time or knowledge. You will not hold this, or my readership, against me because I will keep learning, with your help. Everything in the Digital Garden is a living document and I will retract or rephrase things I no longer agree with.
Organising a personal Knowledge Management system
Link: adubrg.medium.com/organising-a-personal-knowledge-management-system
Growing up and changing is part of the human experience and the tools that accompany you on this journey such as your PKM should follow that same logic.
How I built myself a Digital Garden
Link: timrodenbroeker.de/digital-garden
With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience. With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.
Tom Critchlow
The Digital Garden is a kind of second brain (I took the wording from Tiago Forte). But it is also a place to wander, to think and reflect, to engage with one’s own thoughts and ideas. A kind of culinary exercise of the mind (according to a phrase by Richard David Precht). It helps me a lot to have a central place where I can file my ideas and, above all, find them again.
Transforming Chaos into Clarity: Template for Projects and Hobbies
Link: medium.com/@m_faizan/transforming-chaos-into-clarity-template-for-projects-and-hobbies
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE
WHY?
HOW?
MEASURE
COMPLETION
REWARD
WHAT I DID?
TIMELINE
(Date/Action)
After creating this, I set a reminder to be reminded every Saturday evening to sit and write. That’s all I’ve done. And for the last four weeks, I have been working on this project. You can see my profile and check how many articles I have published.
Building a Second Brain: The Illustrated Notes
Link: maggieappleton.com/basb
I also find the metaphor of a “second brain” troubling in that it doesn’t speak to the significance of embodied cognition and tacit knowledge in how human cognition works. Filling up a “digital brain” as if it were a filing cabinet is highly unlikely to lead to meaningful knowledge and wisdom.