Digital Gardens

Some thoughts on digital gardens.

[Epistemic status: Initial thoughts to introduce the subject. Will add more details and links.]

In building this website I have been partly inspired by the concept of the digital garden.

The dominant approach to regular publishing online, especially for personal websites, is blogging. New content is added in sequence with posts organised in date order by date of publication. This works well for publishing news and updates or online journalling. But not all content needs to be tied to a timeline.

Other kinds of structures can be used for content that is intended to be more permanent. But there is often an expectation that this type of content needs to published in a finished state. Being realistic, for personal websites, waiting for something to be “finished” before publishing it can be a major disincentive to publish anything.

This is where digital gardens can be useful.

A digital garden is an approach where items of content are “planted” in an early unfinished form and then are returned to and worked on over time so that they “grow” into a more finished state.

A good explanation of digital gardens can be found here: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden.