appleton, a brief history and ethos of the digital garden

written 20240503.

an overview of the digital garden, a way of structuring personal websites that emphasises their spatiality and provisionality, and an exploration of digital gardening as a philosophy or practice against the dominant forms that structure our experience of the web.

in comparison to blogs, or social media streams, digital gardens are more like personal wikis. they are collections of interlinked pages structured more by contextual associations than by a fixed publication date. digital gardening as a practice tends to be more experimental and less performative, and so connects to earlier forms of the web, even as it is a response to a decidedly awful to use modern web.

appleton explores the history of the digital garden over several decades and how the term has changed with its context. mark bernstein’s 1998 hypertext gardens figures here as well as mike caulfield’s 2015 the garden and the stream: a technopastoral keynote speech, and other, more recent articles that approach digital gardening as a practice against blogging, or tweeting, or otherwise organising things as a stream.

the article concludes with an overview of the different tools people are using, and of six patterns at the core of this practice. this makes it a really good reference point for starting a digital garden, and for more critically interrogating the ways we post on the web, the assumptions that are built into our technologies and how they structure our interactions with others online.

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appleton, maggie, a brief history and ethos of the digital garden, online