Importance: 90%
The Big Idea
The idea of digital gardening has really resonated with me. The basic idea that notes and concepts and ideas are things that should be grown over time from just little seeds into fully developed ones is beautiful in its simplicity and connectivity to creation. This is all based on the Metaphor of the Stream vs the Garden.
So much of note taking, project management and organization are all about productivity and efficiency as the highest good. But the idea of tending a garden of thoughts, ideas and knowledge is a method that looks to curiosity, creativity and organic exploration as the goal of the tending. Fruits then naturally emerge from the growing process just like the fruits of an actual garden.
The Preservation of Tail Knowledge
The basic method of gardening I have found and desire to develop as a practice for myself is rather simple in its concept:
- Things are stored in flat simple text files using markdown format.
- Individual notes will start with a set of metadata to help me and other readers understand the notes context.
- Internal links between notes. This approach squares nicely with my personal experience of note taking and trying to stay organized as well as my desire for more wholistic Pedagogy.
Personal Purpose of My Garden
The main things I want to accomplish with my garden:
- Have a place to collect and growing ideas.
- Having a kind of incubator for personal projects or church projects that don’t need official documentation yet.
- Have a place to collect personal or other interesting stories I can later use in sermons.
- All of the above reason are additionally driven by the reality that life is crazy and I quickly forget good ideas or where I am on a project so being able to rediscover and search for things is important.
Current State of the Garden
As I begin to experiment with this method I will be collecting things here as a bit of a process journal to help hammer out a more cohesive system for making the garden accessible for myself and others that may find it on the web.
Obsidian Notes and Zotero Library
The two main tools I have started using for creating and tending my garden are Obsidian and Zotero
- Obsidian is becoming the core note taking and garden networking platform for me. It hits a few important requirements for me:
- Saves notes in plain text so they are always accessible and portable. (Something google docs, pdfs and word fail at miserably). If I am going to spend so much time curating my notes I definitely don’t want to lose them for a dumb reason like a failed editor or a locked down file type.
- Customizable and tinker-able but also decently easy to get started with.
- Open source and nonproprietary. So many proprietary tools hid gotchas as a way to make money.
- Zotero is becoming more of a resource catalog. I have many physical books as well as a list of books I want to read, and lists of tools and organizations, etc. keeping those in a note or document ends up being a lot of work and hard to find when you need it. Zotero is nice for this as a way to keep resources cataloged in a more orderly way than the full note garden in obsidian. It is also:
- Opensource.
- Libraries are shareable via groups.
idea I am running with right now for starting a digital garden
- Zotero for resource capturing. Able to capture webpages, books, etc and tag them for later
- Omnivore for newsletter and reader following also save it for later
- Some kind of note system. Need to be easy to add to and searchable. Maybe obsidian
These are running notes on useful things I have collected around these tools: Obsidian Note-taking Zotero Library
Notes on
Additional Gardening Ideas
Other interesting approaches: Note-Taking Methods
What would it look like to have a “community garden” with individual “plots” but a general collaboration on digital gardens