What is a ‘Digital Garden?’

“Digital gardens” are online spaces where you can collect or share information…an organically grown collection of ideas, resources, and thoughts. It’s a place that you can create online that encourages continuous learning, exploration, and growth, much like tending to a physical garden. It’s a living ecosystem of interconnected insights where the ideas and concepts can bloom, cross-pollinate, or sometimes wither away. Unlike a static blog post or article that presents a finished thought, a digital garden's content is often in a constant state of growth and environment. Here are a few of the “digital gardens” I’ve been working on! And if you’re interested, here are some articles about digital gardens:

More about digital gardens:
Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet (MIT Technology Review)
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

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I became interested in creating digital gardens during my MFA program when I started looking for alternative ways to share my art and poetry online. As someone who has been sharing on social media for many years, one of the most challenging aspects was the difficulty in linking posts together over time. It is also hard for people to be able to “search” through everything I’ve shared on many of the popular platforms. While hashtags are available on many platforms, and some platforms allow you to include links to previous posts, there are many limitations with this, it’s hard to link multiple ideas together over the course of time. Most of all, I truly desired the ability to create hyperlinks between posts, enabling people to explore the larger context of my work.

Digital gardens emerged as one of the many avenues I enjoy exploring for achieving this goal. My primary focus is to study how organizing content in various online containers can make it easier for others to find my work and help them understand my creations' broader narrative and interconnectedness.