Web/Digital Gardening

I first heard the term "Digital Gardening" at the inaugural Causal Islands conference in Toronto during 2023, probably during the featured talk by Maggie Appleton, "The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI" (I was there giving a talk/extended demo of live coding improvisation). I was excited to recognize in the concept a handle a for something I felt I had been slowly ambling towards for a long time, ever since putting up my first website at some point in my undergraduate studies in the mid 1990s. I knew right away it was something I wanted to do, to dig deeper into, and to share with others.

Appleton's Digital Gardening Tools and Resources page has lots of links to further generative materials on the topic, and begins with the following helpful definition:

"A garden is something in between a personal blog and a wiki. It's a collection of evolving notes, essays, and ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – posts are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - posts can be published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal "blogs" we're used to encountering on the web." (from Appleton's resources page linked above)

Appleton credits Mike Caulfield's 2015 keynote address to the Digital Learning Research Network, "The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral" as "the original source of the concept of Digital Gardening". I couldn't completely determine what the Digital Learning Research Network was, but it looks like it might have been a small but successful one-off event at Stanford rather than an annual conference. Anyway, Caulfield's keynote is a convincing argument for the importance of the garden over the stream (on the web, as a way of managing our collective informational resources) that highlights the neglect of this way of thinking, and (a bit less so) some of the reasons why this situation has arisen, with lots of reference to teaching and learning contexts, specifically. There is a long shout-out to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think.” (note: the latter essay is not freely available online, only behind a paywall at the Atlantic, where it was originally published.)

According to the bio on Caulfield's keynote post, he is "a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation. Creator of the SIFT methodology, he has taught thousands of teachers and students how to verify claims and sources through his workshops. His new book with Sam Wineburg, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online, was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2023." The Publications and Public Courseware page on Caulfield's site has links to his academic publications about misinformation, civic education, etc that might help to deepen the connection between digital gardening and that set of concerns.