- **Epistemic status:** #evergreen A digital garden is a type of wiki that has a more open-ended structure. Instead of following the traditional blog style showing polished articles in reverse chronological order, the notes are linked by contextual association and are more exploratory. They aren't refined or completed, but grow over time as new information is discovered. One of the first mentions of the term is Mark Bernstein 1998 essay ["Hypertext Gardens"](https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html) that explains the beauty of exploring the internet. At the 2015 Digital Learning Research Network, Mike Caufield delivered a keynote on [The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckv_CjyKyZY&feature=emb_logo). It later became [an essay](https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/) that lays the foundations for our current understanding of the term. The guiding principles of a digital garden are the following: - Contextual relationships and associative links over a time-based structure - Continuous growing, evolving, and changing of information - Imperfection by design - Unique, experimental, and playful - Content diversity - Independent ownership Organizing information is difficult, and we are constantly being bombarded with new information. Streams of email inboxes, group chats, tweets, etc. that try to retain our attention for bits of time organized in chronological order. Caufield's main argument is that we have becomed swept away by streams, and streams are not designed to accumulate knowledge, connect disparate information, or mature over time. Digital gardening aims to solve this problem by changing the way we think of our online behavior around information. The metaphor of “Garden” is for thinking about the process, care, and craft it takes to produce content as it grows. Gardens can be personal, full of wonder and be a source of food. In community gardens, we can work together. Sharing our labor and rewards as part of our collective effort. Tending the garden like planting seeds and pulling weeds are standard practices to reduce entropy. If a garden is not tended, the weeds will take over. If you are interested in building your own digital garden or learning more, visit [Maggie Appleton Digital Garden Tools and Resources Repository.](https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/digital-gardeners) --- ## References - “🌱 My Blog Is a Digital Garden, Not a Blog.” Accessed January 28, 2022. <https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden>. - Maggie Appleton. “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.” Accessed January 28, 2022. <https://maggieappleton.com>. - “Hypertext Gardens.” Accessed January 28, 2022. <https://www.eastgate.com/garden/Enter.html>. - MIKECAULFIELD. “The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.” _Hapgood_ (blog), October 17, 2015. <https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/>. - swyx. _Digital Garden Terms of Service_, 2021. <https://github.com/sw-yx/digital-garden-tos>.