Digital garden

Characteristics

The designer Maggie Appleton sums up the characteristics of a digital garden as follows.

• Topography over timelines — organized not by posting date but by connections of theme and context, with dense linking
• Continuous growth — never finished; always being rewritten and changing
• Imperfection accepted — half-baked thoughts are published too. Many people mark the stage of growth with labels such as "seedling", "budding" and "evergreen"
• Learning in public — sharing not only finished results but the process of thinking along the way

Whereas a blog delivers dated articles to many readers, a digital garden is sometimes explained as something cultivated over time, first of all for oneself, to grow what one wants to grow.

Origins

The garden metaphor goes back to "Hypertext Gardens", an essay Mark Bernstein wrote in 1998. Bernstein described the garden as "something between farmland and wilderness" and likened hypertext to a place that can be explored freely.

What brought this closer to its present form was the keynote "The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral" that Mike Caulfield gave in October 2015 at the dLRN conference at Stanford University. Caulfield contrasted the "stream", the web that lines up information chronologically and lets it flow past, as on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, with the "garden", the web that connects information spatially, integrates it and revises it again and again, as in Vannevar Bush's memex and Ward Cunningham's wiki.

Spread

Around 2020, prompted by Appleton and others introducing examples of digital gardens, the idea attracted attention among developers, writers and knowledge workers as a personal space to replace algorithm-driven social media. In September of that year, MIT Technology Review also covered it as a new attempt to reinvent the blog.