Introduction to digital gardens

The term digital garden was popularized in the late 2010s and early 2020s by writers and technologists looking for an alternative to the blog. A blog is organized as a stream of dated posts, each one finished and published at a point in time. A garden has no such timeline. Entries are planted, grown, and occasionally left to decay, and the reader moves through them by following links between related ideas, rather than scrolling backwards through a chronology. This mirrors how the notes were actually built up — not as a finished argument, but as a web of small, evolving observations.

A digital garden also differs from a wiki. A wiki is usually a collaborative reference, written to be neutral and comprehensive. A garden is personal. It reflects one author’s understanding at a point in time, including the gaps and half-formed ideas, and it’s expected to be revised as that understanding changes.

Like a regular garden, a digital garden needs careful planning and regular tending. You need to be selective about what things you add to it and what you omit. You need to think about how everything will be arranged. In time, new living documents may be planted, and older ones weeded out. It is a perpetual work-in-progress.

For more background on digital gardens, see Maggie Appleton’s essay.

My own digital garden is compiled from a repository of AsciiDoc documents. Each .adoc file is focused on a single idea or concept. Topics may cross-reference one another, but otherwise each file is a self-contained document.