🌿Sapling 😁Strongly-Agree 🟢Conviction
Importance: 90%
The Big Idea
The idea of digital gardening has really resonated with me.
The concept is rather straight forward. A Digital Garden is a place to “plant” notes or other forms of writing in order to edit, extend, and generally “grow” ideas and concepts over time. The underlying metaphor is therefore that of a plant: starting with a seed until eventually growing into fully developed tree or fruit.
I find this mental image very beautiful in its simplicity and connectivity to creation.
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. This all arises from The Need for Slow Thinking in our frenetic and hectic culture.
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.
- There are many alternatives but I have chosen to do this in Obsidian.
- Individual notes will start with a set of metadata to help me and other readers understand the notes context.
- You can find the set of metadata that I have developed here: The Organization of My Digital Garden
- Notes are networked together to create paths and clusters using internal links between notes.
- You can click on them just like any normal internet link and follow a line or group of thoughts. This approach squares nicely with my personal experience of note taking and trying to stay organized. If I try to impose structure on ideas right off the bat it crushes my ability to really explore and think things through. But allowing notes to grow over time helps me move out of the grind and into a more sustainable and honest approach to learning.
Note
- The idea of a digital garden is further developed and built upon in the Metaphor of the Stream vs the Garden.
- The idea of getting out of looking at the world as a collections of mechanical machines is developed more here: A Holistic versus Mechanistic Perspective
Personal Purpose of My Garden
The main things I want to accomplish with my garden:
- Have a place to collect and grow 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 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.
Articles that Got me thinking about Digital Gardening
Current State of the Garden
I have been using this method for a few months now and have found it very enjoyable and useful. It is interesting to even edit this note and see how things have changed as I learn and try things out. I will continue to collect 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, Zotero Library, and Quartz Site
The three main tools I have started using for creating and tending my garden are Obsidian, Zotero, and Quartz
- Obsidian is becoming the core note taking and garden networking platform for me. It hits a few important requirements:
- 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 tinkerable 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.
- Quartz is the framework I am using to actually generate a website out of my notes and then host them on GitHub pages.
- It is also opensource, tinkerable but a lot cleaner and less maintenance than if I built something from scratch.
Note
Technical notes on setting this all up are here:
Overall Learning and Writing Apps
Additional Gardening Ideas
Other interesting approaches to taking notes: Note-Taking Methods
What would it look like to have a “community garden” with individual “plots” but a general collaboration on digital gardens