A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

Several different cultures and concepts have sprung up around the gradual iterative writing of a network of hyperlinked text.

• Wikis
  • Collaboratively edited hypertext publication
  • originated by the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb
    • In turn inspired by HyperCard
      • I think I used a bare-bones clone of this that came with the WorldBook Encyclopedia 2003 CDROM.
        • It was my first introduction to Zettelkasten!
• Zettelkasten
  • A system of addressing and linking physical index cards in a "slip box", to create a network of short written notes that concisely explain a concept.
  • A system of personal knowledge management that predates computers!
• Personal knowledge management
  • Old, old practice.
  • A library counts as a PKM - the Dewey decimal system organizes books by subject into a numerical total order
  • A citation and cross-referencing system counts as a PKM
  • a collection of notebooks counts as a PKM
  • does anyone I know have a library sciences degree? Anyway you can get a degree in this, and I experience a lust for its syllabus.
• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden has a good account of the online conversations that were had laying out the concept and practice of digital gardens in the most modern sense of the term.
• Evergreen notes are a relevant concept of particular interest here.
  • The term was coined by Andy Matuschak to describe notes that are designed to be iteratively rewritten. Close cousin of the living document.

• Hypertext Gardens – a signpost in the era glorious dotcommie hypertext mysticism.
• actual cultural speech markers of a WikiWikiWeb denizen
• The Navigation Problem – a bias-variance tradeoff
• Mike Caufield's The Garden and the Stream: a Technopastoral, a concept-ancestor to This is How You Lose the Time War
• A good recounting of the actual digital garden discussions
• A connection to the digital garden and the cozyweb
• Brief detour into an argument in line with Internet Manifesto

"Digital garden" started as a verb. Digital gardening was an intuition pump for a way to relate to a graph of linked webpages. (Old and venerable idiom for graphs and networks! Witness trees, forests, network growth, evolving networks; ecological networks are a metaphor in the other direction.)