#workflow #knowledge #obsidian ## Overview Digital gardens are an alternative to the other modes of writing and engaging with content on the internet such as very informal approach in the [[Cozy web]] or the more refined and final style of blogs and essays. The basic idea is to cultivate a personal knowledge base over time, where each unit of content is always a work-in-progress, and ideas are connected via dense networks of links. In general, digital gardens are opposed to formalism, rigidity, uniformity, and linearity. Maggie Appleton lays out some principles or "patterns" of Digital Gardens in her [essay on their history](https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history): 1. Topology instead of timelines: Blogs and feeds are often organized chronologically. Digital gardens, however, are organized in a complex topology defined by their linkages. Time is not very important. 2. Continuous growth: The garden is always growing, there is always additions and changes. 3. Imperfections and learning in public: Gardens are imperfect by design, and the uncertainty of a garden is made explicit through the use of markers of "[[Digital Gardening#Epistemic status|epistemic status]]" that tag a post with its level of certainty or finality. Allowing ourselves to publish imperfect information allows others to engage with our work and help to refine it, facilitating [[Digital Gardening#Learning Exhaust|learning in public]]. 6. Playful, personal, and experimental: Gardens should be diverse, weird, and quirky, no two should be the same. Ideally, this means that their authors should be skilled web developers, making it possible to experiment with different formats and approaches. But this is obviously not the case for everyone, so pre-made solutions like [[Obsidian]] work well. 7. Intercropping & Content Diversity: Gardens should not just be all text, but can contain pictures, code, interactive animations, and more. 8. Independent ownership: Gardens should be owned by their creator. Social media website and blogging platforms routinely fail and their content is destroyed. Ability to own and export content ensures that the gardens we make are maintained. ## Opinion I think there are a lot of benefits to digital gardening, particularly the idea of freeing oneself from the pressures of perfection. In particular, I like the idea about marking epistemic status, networks of thoughts, and continuous growth. But I don't think publishing every single little note is useful for anyone, and disincentives me from creating more coherent narratives. So while I think I can follow the principles of the digital garden in my own personal knowledge base, I want at least a minimum threshold of formalism before making anything public. ## Garden and the Stream An important lesson by Mike Caulfield defines two concepts of "streams" and "gardens" in his [famous essay](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/). A "stream" is an information flow that you jump into, and that washes over you. Basically, you have no control, you are seeing a constant feed of information with little context, and all you see and all your actions are collapsed into a single timeline. Social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter offer a stream. A garden treats knowledge as a network that grows and improves over time, and which there are many paths to traverse. There is a topology. The Digital Garden attempts to capture this idea. ## Learning Exhaust When we research and learn things, we should cultivate the habit of creating "[learning exhaust](https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public)". These are things like notes, summaries, newsletters, videos, explanations, tutorials, cartoons, and more that we create based on the things we learn. The act of creating these artifacts helps to cement what we learn. But it also facilitates learning in public, giving resources for other people to read, learn from, and edit as they would like. ## Epistemic status: This is how certain, trusted, or final a piece of content is in a digital garden. Might also be referred to as "Epistemic Effort" (reflecting the amount of effort that went into the content), "[Epistemic Disclosures](https://maggieappleton.com/epistemic-disclosure)", or [Confidence Tags](https://gwern.net/about#confidence-tags). There are lots of ways to handle epistemic status, such as explicit descriptions at the top of a document, to using icons and symbols or numeric scales. There is no one-side-fits all solution. The benefits making epistemic status explicit is that is ensures that is (a) makes the reader know what level of trust to give to the content, and (b) [frees the creator](https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing) from the pressures of having refined and final content tied to their reputation. It allows more freedom to be wrong and evolve your knowledge. ## Resources - [How to set up your own digital garden](https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-set-up) - [Tom Critchlow's "Building a Digital Garden"](https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/) - [Digital Garden Terms of Service](https://www.swyx.io/digital-garden-tos) ## Tools - [[Obsidian]] - [TiddlyWiki](https://tiddlywiki.com/) - [Roam Research](https://roamresearch.com/) ## Shortcomings: - **Getting community input**: The principles of digital gardens are that they are personal, experimental, and often low tech. However, that means that there aren't many great systems for allowing collaboration. For example, what if I am wrong? If a page is plain text, then someone will have to let me know over email or social media, which will obscure the dialogue and add unnecessary friction. Page comments are a bit better, but what if someone comments on one version of the file, but it's changed in a later version? Some sort of version control is necessary, and then some way of linking comments to particular versions. There should be a better way. - **Interopability**: a lot of digital gardening is about linking between things. This is fine for internal links, but what happens over time when links are no longer useful? This is particularly a problem for interoperability between digital gardens, because if one person's garden goes offline, then all the links to it are broken and the information is lost. There are also issues about versioning here, too. What if I reference someone else's digital garden, but then it is altered? Is there a way to reference a particular version of the content, or to receive updates when a change is made? The inherent heterogeneity of gardens make solutions to these problems difficult. - **Longevity**: Similarity, because they are digital, these gardens will eventually fade away if they are not copied and maintained somewhere. Charles Darwin's journals survived and allowed others to glimpse his thoughts a century later, what will happen with digital gardens? There needs to be a "bedrock" at which digital gardens can be etched so that they can stick around for as long as we need them. - **Formalism is not all bad**: The philosophy of digital gardens is against formalism, as a rule. But there are very clear benefits to formalism both from the perspectives of the reader and writer, as laid out in [another blog post](https://vivqu.com/blog/2020/10/18/digital-gardens/). For the writer, a formal essay forces them to make their arguments clear and strong, which isn't really incentivized in the digital garden approach. For readers, these clear are easier to grasp, whereas the lack of clear direction or developed ideas in a digital garden might not be as helpful. This links back into the issues of heterogeneity: if there are no standards in the digital garden, then it can be hard to make sense of the content. An essay, though flawed, acts as a kind of "standard" that guides a reader. ## Ideas - Could we treat scientific claims as a digital garden? Like, make an always-on consensus building exercise, where we have a claim, and link to it relevant studies, caveats, criticisms, levels of confidence, etc.?