Digital Garden
February 11, 2022
I think of this site as my digital garden.
What is a digital garden? #
A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public. Contrary to a blog, where articles and essays have a publication date and start decaying as soon as they are published, a digital garden is evergreen: digital gardeners keep on editing and refining their notes.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff, How to set up your own digital garden
The phrase “digital garden” is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting “showpiece” and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there.
Joel Hooks, My blog is a digital garden, not a blog
Digital gardens are tended to and evolve over time. Sometimes they grow, sometimes they get trimmed back. Though they change, they have the four-dimensional permanence of a river or Theseus’s Ship.
Chuck Grimmett, What are digital gardens?
Why a digital garden? #
I’ve spent years studying, learning, and processing. Much of that was done in isolation.
A digital garden is quite the opposite: it takes all those mental exercises and lays it bare in a public format.
I like that idea for two main reasons:
- It creates a possibly positive externality for something that I undertake primarily for my own benefit. Maybe a reader will find this mass of text and content useful.
- The act of sharing I find helps me grasp and retain information better.
Most of the information I’ve tried to absorb in isolation comes in and flows right out.
Sharing in public will hopefully make me a better learner.
My approach to digital gardening #
I am messy. In my thoughts, in my crafts, in my processes.
That’s how it starts though – a mess. Over time, I do like to refine my thinking and my activities.
This little digital garden will have rough patches turning up on the regular.
Once established, I intend to come back to them periodically to cultivate and curate.
After enough passes, there will hopefully be polished nuggets in this garden.
Enjoy the journey.
The tools of the garden #
This site is coded up with Blogdown, tracked with Github, and deployed with Netlify.
It’s practically designed to let me build, revise, and share quickly and painlessly.
By design, the friction to my gardening has been minimized.
Fingers crossed that this garden thrives.