Digital garden

A digital garden is a collection of notes taken on an electronic medium. What sets it apart from a blog, is that writing in a garden is not performative. It's not meant to optimize for viewership or a reader, in most cases it is not meant to be made public at all.

Most digital gardens are meant to sit in a computer (or a private cloud). They are a source of inspiration for better thinking. Some people like to talk about "the second brain" which I believe it is too much of a stretch for an imperfect system of note-taking.

There are some people, like myself, who decided gardening in public is a good idea. Some popular ones include Notes by Andy Matuschak, Tom Critchlow, or perhaps the best known Gwern.

In the end, it all comes down to writing down notes with some system behind it. In the quest for the ultimate set of rules, people rediscovered the Zettelkasten method, popularized by the book How to Take Smart Notes.

Although the Luhmann method was born around a static medium such as paper, today we have available alternatives. On paper, searching is not possible, which means that storing has to be intentional to ensure proper retrieval.

Today, we can talk about evergreen notes, i.e. infinitely editable, improvable, and linkable notes and backlinks. The digital medium removed a lot of the friction around maintaining an organized thought space, but also removed a lot of the intentionality around writing and storing a note.

Piling on the idea of "gardening", we can also think about what it means Tendering a digital garden.

I am still ambivalent with the value that this garden has brought me when it comes to finding insightful knowledge. Nonetheless is one of the very few digital activities that I've managed to keep alive after many years.

Tags: #digital-garden, #writing, #knowledge-management #knowledge-generation