Digital Gardens

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What is a digital garden?

A digital garden is a curated collection of resources that grows organically over time. Unlike blogs that are locked into a linear (reverse chronological) timeline, digital gardens are wiki-like commonplace collections, or virtual libraries, that are cultivated with a focus on exploration and discovery.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. ~ Maggie Appleton | Source

The garden is our counterbalance [ to online feeds ]. Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. . . . It’s hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces. ~ Maggie Appleton | Source

Typically, most digital gardens do not have a table of contents or a conventional website navigation menu. Instead a few select bookmarks and doorways provide entry points into the main areas of the garden ~ and all of the other garden content is connected with a nonlinear network of links.

In the case of the DiscoveryNow library, many of these connections are visible in adjacent navigation screen.
Many more connections can be accessed using the highlighted links within this note panel.

Perhaps most importantly, digital gardens are a dynamic and creative antidote to the burgeoning mass of dead, commercially sterile and AI-generated slop content currently flooding the Internet.

Related Resources

Learn More

You can learn more now about the DiscoveryNow library ~ or review the Quick Start Guide, and then begin exploring!

For those who are interested, you can also learn more now about how to create your own digital garden.