Growing a Garden

Another approach to taking notes, which helps with marshalling resources for further reference or future study, is to grow a digital garden. I’ve noticed Emacs’s org-mode is quite good at organizing such notes. (See, e.g., my org-notes for how I’ve experimented with org-mode.)

This approach dates back to 1998, Mark Bernstein introduced the notion of a “hypertext garden”.

I suppose this wiki could be viewed as a digital garden, since I’m growing articles by my wandering interests. Though there’s a notion of “interconnectedness from article-to-article” which is lacking in my organizational approach, which seems to be just a list of articles organized as trees (some pages are just branches, other pages are leafs).

• Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet, MIT Technology Review
• My blog is a digital garden, not a blog
• Amy Hoy, How the Blog Broke the Web
• Tom Critchlow’s Building a digital garden