--- date: '2024-02-09' description: linked notes revised over time, with sources and connections that remain useful beyond the day they were written. id: Digital garden modified: 2026-10-13 09:07:53 GMT-04:00 tags: - seed - pattern title: Digital garden created: '2024-02-09' published: '2024-02-09' pageLayout: default slug: thoughts/Digital-garden permalink: https://aarnphm.xyz/thoughts/Digital-garden.md generator: quartz: v4.6.0 hostedProvider: Cloudflare baseUrl: aarnphm.xyz full: https://aarnphm.xyz/llms-full.txt --- A digital garden is a collection of linked notes that stay open to revision. A note can begin with a question or an excerpt. Later, it can acquire an explanation, a worked example, or a correction. Keeping these changes on the same page gives the idea an address that other notes can refer to. [Maggie Appleton’s account](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history) describes this practice of publishing unfinished work and revisiting it. The links make this a form of [[thoughts/Hypertext|hypertext]]. They also need context: a sentence around a link can say whether its target supplies a definition, evidence, or an objection. Wikipedia is a familiar example of linked, revisable pages. A personal garden leaves the selection and interpretation with its author. Ted Nelson’s Xanadu has further requirements, including durable connections to quoted material and a system for paying rightsholders. Calling any collection of linked notes a Xanadu system would skip those commitments. [Nelson’s own explanation](https://hyperland.com/TBLpage) draws out the distinction. [Joel Hooks](https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden) describes the maintenance implied by the name: > A garden is usually a place where things grow. > > Gardens can be very personal and full of whimsy or a garden can be a source of food and substance. > > We gather and work together in community gardens to share the labor as well as the rewards of a collective effort. > > It’s a comparison that you can take very far. From “planting seeds” and “pulling weeds” to tending multiple gardens that each serve an individual need or desired outcome. > > Like with real gardens, our digital gardens are a constant ebb and flow towards [[thoughts/Entropy|entropy]].

Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.

We have an epic collection going, check these out...

1. @tomcritchlow's Wikifolders: https://t.co/QnXw0vzbMG https://t.co/9ri6g9hD93

See also: Tom Critchlow’s [Building a digital garden](https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/). ## The garden and the stream [Mike Caulfield](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/) uses the stream for posts arranged by time and the garden for ideas arranged through their connections. A stream records an unfolding conversation. A garden gives a topic a page that can collect evidence from several conversations and be revised when that evidence changes. His example starts with a news story and becomes a page about a claim in the underlying study. Adding a related note exposes a possible confounder in his first interpretation. That is a concrete use for the links: following one can change what the current page should say. > I don’t want people to get hung up on the technology angle. I think sometimes people hear “Federated Thingamabob” and just sort of tune out thinking “Oh, he’s talking about a feature of Federated Thingamabob.” But I’m not. I’m really not. I’m talking about a different way to think your online activity, no matter what tool you use. And relevant to this conference, I’m talking about a different way of collaborating as well.