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Worm Icon D i g i t a l g a r d e n i n g 1 0 1

Essays and reading material

Platforms for building a digital garden

Timestamps

  • 0:26 — What is a digital garden?
  • 2:36 — History of digital gardens
  • 4:51 — How it helps your digital garden
  • 7:37 — How to use it as a creative
  • 9:44 — How to start your own
  • 10:53 — Conclusion

Transcript

0:00 · Hi. I’m Margaret and I want to talk to you about my current hyper fixation.

0:04 · Digital feel like I’ve been talking to all my creative friends about digital gardening being like, have you heard about digital gardening?

0:16 · Do you want to see my digital garden?

0:18 · Can I show you how to start one?

0:20 · I think you should start And at this point, I think I should just make a video about So what is digital gardening?

What is a digital garden?

0:28 · Digital gardening is like a personal wiki, a place where you can not only collect different thoughts and ideas, but connect them together similar to a commonplace journal or a second It’s ultimately a place on the internet, or at least your computer, that encourages continuous learning and curiosity that specific to Like, have you gone down a Wikipedia hole?

0:47 · You maybe watched a movie and it made you look up the actor and maybe who they dated, and before you know it, you land on an article about the sweater curse.

0:55 · Now imagine that.

0:56 · But it’s articles of things you’re interested in or media that you consumed.

0:59 · You can connect that movie to the sweater curse with things that you were interested in or read, and then maybe that generates new insight and potentially are related, but completely new concept.

1:09 · Also, the Sweater Curse is my favorite Wikipedia article.

1:12 · It’s a fun Maggie Appleton, a research engineer with a robust digital garden herself, wrote that a typical digital garden consists of the following things.

1:21 · number one. Topography over timelines.

1:24 · Digital gardens are not considered blogs because it’s non chronological.

1:27 · Instead, the content is structured through hyperlinks by connecting two different ideas or sources to come up with a uniquely you idea.

1:34 · Number two.

1:35 · Continuous Digital gardens are meant to be grown over time, always evolving and changing.

1:41 · Number three imperfection and learning.

1:43 · And if you put it on the internet, it’s learning in public.

1:46 · You’re allowing people to see your references, inspiration, nodes and overall creative process.

1:51 · Number four playful, personal and experimental.

1:54 · There isn’t necessarily a theme or template to a digital garden, unless you count the theme and template as Are you interested in knitted socks in the history of cars?

2:03 · Do you like long form essays or short notes?

2:05 · You can build your digital garden to match the way you think and create.

2:09 · Five intercropping and Content diversity.

2:12 · We get our information from a myriad of places and you can root them all in a digital garden.

2:17 · It’s the place where you can plant a tidbit from a podcast, a photo from a camera an article from a book, a link to a YouTube video.

2:24 · This is where it all can live.

2:25 · And six independent ownership.

2:28 · Ideally, digital gardens are independently owned, not hosted on a platform like Instagram or Pinterest, where you’re confined by the rules and algorithm of the app.

History of digital gardens

2:37 · How did it start?

2:38 · The first recorded mention of the term digital gardening is Mark Bernstein’s 1998 essay Hypertext Gardens.

2:44 · It’s very old internet in a nostalgic In his essay, he likens different spaces of the internet as either wilderness or a corporate office.

2:52 · Think of it as an unorganized tracks document with all your notes is wilderness.

2:57 · And let’s say an app like Instagram is the corporate office.

3:00 · one is almost unusable depending on how large it is and the other is rigid, not really allowing creativity in its structure.

3:07 · and it he writes, gardens and parks lie between farmland and wilderness.

3:11 · The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.

3:16 · The park is wilderness tamed for our enjoyment, since most hypertext aims neither for the wilderness or unplanned content, nor for the straight rows of formal organization, gardens and parks can inspire a new approach to hypertext design and can help us understand the patterns we observe and find.

3:33 · Hypertext writing.

3:34 · Bernstein also has its own digital Garden, and it has cookie recipes and notes on every book he’s read.

3:39 · How we use digital gardens today is more similar to Mike coalfields 2015 essay.

3:44 · He goes deeper into the gardening metaphor by describing the internet we know today as streams.

3:49 · In his essay, he in the stream metaphor, you don’t experience this stream by walking around it and looking at it or following it to its end.

3:57 · You jump in and let it flow past.

3:59 · You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.

4:01 · It’s not that you’re passive in the stream.

4:03 · You can be active, but your actions in there, your blog posts, mentions, form comments exist in a context that is collapsed down to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.

4:13 · This is honestly how I felt when I was a creative marketing myself on Instagram, though in the moment it felt more like a hamster wheel than a stream.

4:22 · every photo I posted felt like it had the lifespan of maybe, maybe three days.

4:28 · It would be at the top of my feet, and then by the end of the day, washed away with the rest of the content that was being created.

4:33 · And then the cycle goes, and then I’d have to create a new post and then another new post.

4:39 · In contrast, imagine a digital garden.

4:41 · You plant ideas as seeds and continue to water them by adding to it and connecting them all together. as migrates.

4:47 · It’s a tool to think with, not a tool to publish How digital gardening helps your creativity.

How it helps your digital garden

4:53 · okay, so now you know what digital gardening is and its origin story.

4:57 · But why should you start one and how does it help your creativity?

5:01 · Number one, You have a home for all the things you’re inspired by.

5:05 · And I mean all of the things.

5:08 · It can be a book you really liked, a movie that you loved, an article you read.

5:11 · It can be images, a quote, a screenshot.

5:14 · All of these are possible items you can include in your digital garden, and you can take it one step further.

5:19 · Anna Howard, in her video essay about Digital Gardens, talks about using a digital garden to consume media thoughtfully After you watch said movie, right.

5:27 · What your takeaways were. What did you notice?

5:29 · Did you have any unanswered questions?

5:31 · Which leads me to number two.

5:34 · You become an active learner.

5:35 · Since digital gardening, I have been actually taking more notes.

5:39 · After I watch a how to video, I take notes, a library book, notes.

5:44 · This helps information sink in and gives them staying power.

5:47 · In the past, after I watch a how to video, I would just watch the next how to video that followed.

5:52 · whatever I learned simply dissolved with time, with no taking?

5:56 · You’re actively learning and staying curious And isn’t curiosity a huge part of creativity?

6:02 · Number three, you get to know yourself better and keep going.

6:06 · By Austin Kleon he writes about how to stay creative.

6:09 · One of his points is to pay attention to what you pay attention What are the things that you gravitate towards that bring you joy?

6:15 · Then he recommends collecting these things as a whole and looking for patterns.

6:19 · Digital gardening does a great job of mapping out your interests in a way that makes it easier to spot patterns.

6:24 · it reveals something about you to you.

6:26 · What concepts keep coming up?

6:28 · for example, when assembling my digital garden, I noticed I gravitated towards little metal boxes, pillboxes, vintage cigarette cases, etc..

6:38 · Now I want to pull on that thread create my Seeing your interests as a whole can spark an idea like what Kleon says in his book.

6:45 · When you have a system for going back through your work, you can better see the bigger picture of what you’ve been up to and what you should do next.

6:52 · Number four, it’s a way to be online without being online.

6:57 · There is less pressure and there’s no algorithm.

6:59 · A digital garden is not like a blogger. Instagram.

7:02 · You don’t have to publish an article or even finish thoughts.

7:05 · You don’t even have to publish it technically.

7:07 · Digital gardening is not focused on an outcome.

7:09 · It’s driven by curiosity and its journey.

7:12 · I also think apps are noisy between the ads and the short form videos and the literal endless feed of mostly pointless information, it’s hard to stop and actually listen to your own thoughts.

7:22 · Like, was that my idea or just a regurgitated idea from a grudge?

7:26 · Idea from regurgitated idea think I underestimate the influence of a dozen 15 second videos saying the same thing, But this may be a just me thing.

7:35 · So let me know your thoughts, How to use it as a creative.

How to use it as a creative?

7:38 · Something I struggled with and why it took me so long to adopt digital gardening, was that I didn’t find many public digital gardens that I could relate because of its non-linear format and interconnecting structure.

7:49 · The people who took to digital gardening best were people who could code, developers, etc.

7:54 · I considered myself a coder until I had to open up a GitHub and look up how to clone a repository in order to publish my own digital garden.

8:03 · More on that later.

8:04 · Even at the time of this video, I haven’t found many public digital gardens that feature makers creatives.

8:10 · even though I think they would benefit so much from a digital garden, I did find a few and I’ll make a separate Substack about It wasn’t until I came across Carolyn used Digital Garden that finally clicked with Carolyn is an artist and writer, and I love her Substack.

8:24 · Her Digital Garden is public, and it’s a personal wiki.

8:27 · A list of how to’s, a collection of concepts, references.

8:30 · Honestly, seeing the list of how to’s that inspired me to start my own, I consume so many how to videos tutorials, it’s so nice to compile them in a space where I can visit and navigate easily.

8:42 · A few things you can plant in your digital garden include, Like we said, tutorials, articles on business best practices, mood boards, reviews, book reports, mini essays or full essays, recipes, story concepts, half formed ideas.

8:58 · Literally anything you want.

8:59 · If you’re an artist, you can use a digital garden to collect design inspiration from books and online.

9:04 · you can document your creative process.

9:06 · And if you’re feeling up for it, show it to potential employers in an interview.

9:10 · What I’ve been doing is going through my different art books and taking photos of things that inspire me and putting them in my digital garden.

9:16 · So it’s all in one place where I can see.

9:18 · If you’re a writer, you can collect quotes and write stories.

9:21 · If you’re a maker, It’s also a great tool to write a project diary.

9:25 · If you’re working on a specific project you can write down your findings on what worked, what didn’t, where you bought your materials, etc..

9:32 · I find collecting these help your future self as well.

9:35 · In case you ever want to reiterate on that project, you don’t have to think, what did I buy for that project?

9:40 · Where did I get that casted?

9:42 · Project diaries are very useful.

How to start your own

9:44 · How to start your own.

9:46 · If you’re a coder, you can build your own.

9:48 · If not, there’s a couple tools you can use.

9:50 · Obsidian notion are just two of them.

9:53 · There’s also arena, Rome Garden, and sublime.

9:55 · In this video, I’ll talk to you about the first two since they are free and you can make unlimited pages.

10:01 · whichever you choose largely depends on your needs.

10:04 · I like obsidian because of its simplicity.

10:07 · It’s a free app that’s mostly text heavy, but they do have this feature called canvas where you can map out photos.

10:13 · If you want to publish your Obsidian Digital Garden, it is $8 a month.

10:17 · if you want to publish online for free.

10:19 · Like I have, you can use quartz, but you’ll need a little GitHub experience or at the very least an account.

10:24 · My favorite feature is the brain map.

10:27 · It’s just so satisfying to see it fill up the more you write and add to your digital garden Notion is great too.

10:34 · It’s also free and doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

10:37 · There are also digital gardening templates that you can start with, so you don’t have to build completely from scratch.

10:42 · What I’ve personally found is sometimes notion offers me too much personalization and freedom that I get caught up in making it look good rather than actually writing.

10:51 · But again, it’s all a so in conclusion, since digital gardening, I’m actually motivated to collect sources and write my thoughts on them.

Conclusion

11:00 · It’s made me not only consume content thoughtfully, but actually seek out and research topics that I’m interested in.

11:07 · I want to long list of tutorials for future me to visit.

11:10 · I want to see the patterns develop in the little brain map, but those are things that come with time and tending to just like an actual garden.

11:18 · Right now I’m working on a flipping wax signet, and it’s been so cool to use the Obsidian Canvas feature to paste inspiration photos and map them all together.

11:27 · I’ve also been journaling through my creative process with this project, which you can read in my digital garden at Garden Margaret Albert.

11:34 · You’ll find that most of my original garden is about digital gardening.

11:39 · But what can I tell you?

11:40 · It’s my current hyper fixation.

11:42 · so much for watching this video.

11:43 · It’s been fun to do research on this.

11:46 · I used my digital garden to research for this video.

11:51 · I hope to create more.

11:52 · Probably do a tour of my own digital garden in the If you like this video, let me know and I’ll see you in the next one.