What is a Digital Garden

I’m not exactly sure what a Digital Garden is, but in my mind, it’s a a place where information is constantly being added to and knowledge is always being expanded. It’s a tool/location/construct that borrows from information-interlinking concepts such as those employed by wikis, Zettlekasten, and blogs. But unlike a blog, this should be a place that both the author and their readers revisit often: one where the author constantly adds both content and context to the corpus of information through both updating existing documents and adding additional, interlinked documents.

The MIT Technology Review has written a lot more about the nature of digital gardens than I will, so this is a useful article to gain a better understanding. From the article:

“Everyone does their own weird thing”

The movement might be gaining steam now, but its roots date back to 1998, when Mark Bernstein introduced the idea of the “hypertext garden,” arguing for spaces on the internet that let a person wade into the unknown. “Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.” (His digital garden includes a recent review of a Bay Area carbonara dish and reflections on his favorite essays.)

(and, apparently, it is the duty of every Digital Garden author to define what it is, so here we are!)

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