A digital garden is a work-in-progress website, something of a personal wiki, built of out fragments and half-formed ideas. It grows over time rather than staying static. The idea of a digital garden is not new, though it is having something of a renaissance these days apparently. It can be traced back to early experiments in hypertext in the late 1990s, and although I won’t go into all that here for the sake of brevity, you can read Maggie Appleton’s excellent A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden for more. I started my first explorations of The Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and did come across the idea, and wanted a digital garden of my own, but couldn’t figure out what I might fill it with. What I realise now, and didn’t then, is I was already gardening on paper; cramming notebooks with quotations and ideas and important pieces of information I might need later. (What can i say? Autistic timelines are long.)
But what I want to talk about here is some of my method.
My writing happens inside Obsidian, a free Markdown editor that allows you to build a linked ecosystem of files anywhere you like (hard drive, cloud storage, etc.). I write and capture pieces of information using the Zettelkasten method, assigning each file a unique identifier and linking it to other relevant files.
My file names are date based, formatted as starting with Year-Month-Day-Time. Using this code, I can ingest almost anything into my Obsidian vault and make it part of my research and writing. I can also travel back in time to old notebooks and extract information from there, archiving it digitally by date. It is only more recently that I am coming to understand this glorious chronology as an exercise in lining up toys, or perhaps the the mother of all lining up toys-associated activities. Yergeau (2018, p.72) has framed this early sign of autism as evidence of a perceived “irreducible relationality” between things. As my files accumulate I am embracing my tendency to see connections between very different ideas and topics more and more.
But I will get into that, and my deep love of sequencing, in another blogpost.
Along with the Year-Month-Day-Time identifier, I use a tagging system to place files within certain categories. This is a quick way of grouping entries together that might not yet be directly linked for various reasons. Obsidian creates a visual map of each entry, along with its associated tags. With the help of Claude Code I have built a similar map on the Garden page here. Seeing the entries in this fragmented way, and visually, allows me to move around more fluidly and create more connections than I would do by opening and closing individual documents.
My Obsidian vault now hosts most of what I am working on day to day, including the files for this website. I generate ideas and draft completed notes or blogposts, and then push individual files to GitHub when they are ready to publish. This way of doing things allows my writing to be more fluid. I can be very productive in small pockets of time (usually all I have), and ideas are easier to get to and progress.
I also engage in a lot of information gathering to feed the vault, and plant in the garden here. Much of this comes via social media timelines and reading books or articles, but also from daily encounters or deliberate digging into my own pre-Obsidian archives. What should be here on GitHub vs. my longer form writing projects or elsewhere is something I am still working out, but I can already see the Garden is taking some kind of shape. Tom Critchlow has a nice blogpost on information consumption and time horizons that explores how he defines different categories of information to build his digital garden.
As is usually my way, I adhered very strictly to the Zettelkasten method until I realised that my ability to collect interesting bits of information was far greater than my ability to tag and file it, and so rather than slowing the whole process down too much I now engage in something I call ‘composting’ - pulling in everything I have found interesting on a weekly basis, and allowing unconnected files to build up (horror!) so they are at hand for when they are needed. This also adds some spice to Obsidian’s ‘open random note’ function, and indeed a lot of the thinking I have been developing recently owes a lot to serendipitous file viewing. Something that helps with this is the Smart Connections plugin for Obsidian, which uses a local embedding model to show notes related to the one you have open.
This is my method so far, no doubt I will have more updates as the garden establishes itself, but for a future blogpost.
References
MAGGIE APPLETON - A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
TOM CRITCHLOW - Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens: https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/10/of-gardens-and-wikis/
OBSIDIAN: https://obsidian.md/
BRIAN PETRO’S SMART CONNECTIONS: https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections
M. REMI YERGEAU (2018) Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurologial Queerness, Duke University Press (URL: https://www.dukeupress.edu/authoring-autism)
ZETTELKASTEN.de - Getting Started: https://zettelkasten.de/overview/