Author(s): Maggie Appleton | Source(s): https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history/
A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.
Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens appears to be the first recorded mention of the term. {J: Hypertext Gardens}
After Mark’s essay the term digital gardening goes quiet for nearly a decade.
In April of 2007 when Tweets first started ringing through the internet airwaves, Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group) used the term “digital gardening”, but defined it as “faffing about syncing things, defragging - like pruning for young people” {J: Cleaning things and maintenance, rather than creation}
At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered a keynote on The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral . It later becomes a hefty essay that lays the foundations for our current understanding of the term. {J: The Garden and the Stream (by Mike Caulfield)}
Think about the way Wikipedia works when you’re hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar’s Number. It’s hyperlinking at its best.
Tom Critchlow’s 2018 article Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardenswas one of the main kick-off points {J: Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens (by Tom Critchlow) }
Tom piece was shortly followed by Joel Hooks’ My blog is a digital garden, not a blog in early 2019
Joel also added Amy Hoy’s How the Blog Broke the Web post to the pile of influential ideas that led to our current gardening infatuation… history of blogs over the last three decades, and pinpoints exactly when we all became fixated on publishing our thoughts in reverse chronological order (spoiler: around 200125ya with the launch of Moveable Type ). {J: How the Blog Broke the Web (by Amy Hoy) }
commonplace books, personal wikis, and memory palaces {J: inbox Other words for digital garden? }
{J: inbox A Garage is like a digital garden but allows for Learning in public. Constantly working (gardening), sometimes Working with my garage door up, sometimes door down. }
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don’t hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth.
Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how “done” they are, and how much effort you’ve invested in them. {J: inbox Include note status in the Garage }
Other gardeners include an epistemic status on their posts – a short statement that makes clear how they know what they know, and how much time they’ve invested in researching it. {J: Devon Zuegal started using to make it more comfortable to share half-baked ideas #TEMP/inbox Could also be cool to include in Garage. }
{J: inbox Research all the names in here}
{J: She has mentions, likes and BlueSky replies at the bottom of the page. Syndicating Garage content}
Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy version of the personal blog.