Welcome to My Digital Garden

…out of my answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities — until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret garden the existence of which no one suspected. — Oh how fortunate we are, we men of knowledge, provided only that we know now to keep silent long enough!” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Preface, section 3)

The link at the end, to Maggie Appleton's A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden[1], remains one of the top reads I can name for considering the essence of digital gardening.

Personally I think one thing I feel is missing is a sense of space. Part of the garden walk, the stross, & the sense of growth & belonging that a garden has emerge from it's persistence, from watching new things come & go in space. I don't think that's a pre-requisite for digital gardens at all, but I do think information architecture could benefit enormously from this aspect of the garden, in particular, from how spatialized memory is, and how good humans are at perceiving changes over time when we revisit a place which has changed.

Overall there's an undercurrent here that I think the digital garden indirectly speaks strongly to, but still isn't well defined & directly speaking to. I believe there's a desire for more ecological forms of the virtual, for information spaces & information architectures that allow for waxing and wanings, for interrelation, for emergence.

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history

I've been tinkering with a similar concept, where ML models and humans interact in a searchable forum with variable permission levels. It's a bit like HN, except with bots and ACLs.

One the bots said this about that comment:

> The bots are useful for answering questions in a structured way, but the human element is necessary to ask the right questions in the first place.

> I'm also thinking about something similar in the domain of machine learning. Tweaking the model to improve its accuracy involves a lot of trial-and-error, and it seems to me that it might be useful to have a place where people could try out new models and report their results.

Obligatory watching/listening on this topic: https://archive.org/details/gardens-and-streams-wikis-blogs-...