Digital gardening 101 — Transcript

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1. 0:00Hi. I'm Margaret and I want to talk to you about my current hyper fixation.
2. 0:04Digital
3. 0:09feel like I've been talking to all my creative friends
4. 0:12about digital gardening being like, have you heard about digital gardening?
5. 0:16Do you want to see my digital garden?
6. 0:18Can I show you how to start one?
7. 0:20I think you should start And at this point,
8. 0:22I think I should just make a video about So what is digital gardening?
9. 0:28Digital gardening is like a personal wiki, a place where you can not only collect
10. 0:32different thoughts and ideas, but connect them together similar
11. 0:35to a commonplace journal or a second It's ultimately a place on the internet,
12. 0:39or at least your computer, that encourages continuous learning and curiosity
13. 0:43that specific to Like, have you gone down a Wikipedia hole?
14. 0:47You maybe watched a movie and it made
15. 0:48you look up the actor and maybe who they dated, and before you know
16. 0:51it, you land on an article about the sweater curse.
17. 0:55Now imagine that.
18. 0:56But it's articles of things you're interested in or media that you consumed.
19. 0:59You can connect that movie to the sweater curse with things
20. 1:02that you were interested in or read, and then maybe that generates
21. 1:05new insight and potentially are related, but completely new concept.
22. 1:09Also, the Sweater Curse is my favorite Wikipedia article.
23. 1:12It's a fun Maggie Appleton, a research engineer with a robust digital garden
24. 1:16herself, wrote that a typical digital garden consists of the following things.
25. 1:21number one. Topography over timelines.
26. 1:24Digital gardens are not considered blogs because it's non chronological.
27. 1:27Instead, the content is structured through hyperlinks by connecting
28. 1:30two different ideas or sources to come up with a uniquely you idea.
29. 1:34Number two.
30. 1:35Continuous
31. 1:36Digital gardens are meant to be grown over time, always evolving and changing.
32. 1:41Number three imperfection and learning.
33. 1:43And if you put it on the internet, it's learning in public.
34. 1:46You're allowing people
35. 1:47to see your references, inspiration, nodes and overall creative process.
36. 1:51Number four playful, personal and experimental.
37. 1:54There isn't necessarily a theme or template to a digital garden,
38. 1:58unless you count the theme and template as Are you interested in knitted socks
39. 2:01in the history of cars?
40. 2:03Do you like long form essays or short notes?
41. 2:05You can build your digital garden to match the way you think and create.
42. 2:09Five intercropping and Content diversity.
43. 2:12We get our information from a myriad of places
44. 2:15and you can root them all in a digital garden.
45. 2:17It's the place where you can plant a tidbit from a podcast,
46. 2:19a photo from a camera an article from a book, a link to a YouTube video.
47. 2:24This is where it all can live.
48. 2:25And six independent ownership.
49. 2:28Ideally, digital gardens are independently owned, not hosted on a platform
50. 2:32like Instagram
51. 2:33or Pinterest, where you're confined by the rules and algorithm of the app.
52. 2:37How did it start?
53. 2:38The first recorded mention of the term digital gardening is Mark Bernstein's 1998
54. 2:42essay Hypertext Gardens.
55. 2:44It's very old internet in a nostalgic In his essay, he likens different
56. 2:48spaces of the internet as either wilderness or a corporate office.
57. 2:52Think of it as an unorganized tracks document with all your notes
58. 2:56is wilderness.
59. 2:57And let's say an app like Instagram is the corporate office.
60. 3:00one is almost unusable depending on how large it is
61. 3:03and the other is rigid, not really allowing creativity in its structure.
62. 3:07and it he writes, gardens and parks lie between farmland and wilderness.
63. 3:11The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight
64. 3:15rather than commodity.
65. 3:16The park is wilderness tamed for our enjoyment,
66. 3:19since most hypertext aims neither for the wilderness or unplanned content,
67. 3:23nor for the straight rows of formal organization, gardens and parks
68. 3:27can inspire a new approach to hypertext design
69. 3:30and can help us understand the patterns we observe and find.
70. 3:33Hypertext writing.
71. 3:34Bernstein also has its own digital Garden,
72. 3:36and it has cookie recipes and notes on every book he's read.
73. 3:39How we use digital gardens today is more similar to Mike coalfields 2015 essay.
74. 3:44He goes deeper into the gardening metaphor by describing the internet we know today
75. 3:48as streams.
76. 3:49In his essay, he in the stream metaphor, you don't experience this stream
77. 3:53by walking around it and looking at it or following it to its end.
78. 3:57You jump in and let it flow past.
79. 3:59You feel the force of it hit you as things float by.
80. 4:01It's not that you're passive in the stream.
81. 4:03You can be active, but your actions in there,
82. 4:05your blog posts, mentions, form comments exist in a context that is collapsed down
83. 4:10to a simple timeline of events that together form a narrative.
84. 4:13This is honestly how I felt when I was a creative marketing myself
85. 4:18on Instagram, though in the moment it felt more like a hamster wheel than a stream.
86. 4:22every photo I posted felt like it had the lifespan of maybe, maybe three days.
87. 4:28It would be at the top of my feet, and then by the end of the day,
88. 4:30washed away with the rest of the content that was being created.
89. 4:33And then the cycle goes,
90. 4:35and then I'd have to create a new post and then another new post.
91. 4:39In contrast, imagine a digital garden.
92. 4:41You plant ideas as seeds and continue to water them by adding to it
93. 4:44and connecting them all together. as migrates.
94. 4:47It's a tool to think with, not a tool to publish
95. 4:50How digital gardening helps your creativity.
96. 4:53okay, so now you know what digital gardening is and its origin story.
97. 4:57But why should you start one and how does it help your creativity?
98. 5:01Number one, You have a home for all the things you're inspired by.
99. 5:05And I mean all of the things.
100. 5:08It can be a book you really liked, a movie that you loved, an article you read.
101. 5:11It can be images, a quote, a screenshot.
102. 5:14All of these are possible items you can include in your digital garden,
103. 5:17and you can take it one step further.
104. 5:19Anna Howard, in her video
105. 5:20essay about Digital Gardens, talks about using a digital garden
106. 5:23to consume media thoughtfully After you watch said movie, right.
107. 5:27What your takeaways were. What did you notice?
108. 5:29Did you have any unanswered questions?
109. 5:31Which leads me to number two.
110. 5:34You become an active learner.
111. 5:35Since digital gardening, I have been actually taking more notes.
112. 5:39After I watch a how to video, I take notes, a library book, notes.
113. 5:44This helps information sink in and gives them staying power.
114. 5:47In the past, after I watch a how to video, I would just watch the next
115. 5:51how to video that followed.
116. 5:52whatever I learned simply dissolved with time, with no taking?
117. 5:56You're actively learning and staying
118. 5:57curious And isn't curiosity a huge part of creativity?
119. 6:02Number three, you get to know yourself better and keep going.
120. 6:06By Austin Kleon he writes about how to stay creative.
121. 6:09One of his points is to pay attention to what you pay attention
122. 6:12What are the things that you gravitate towards that bring you joy?
123. 6:15Then he recommends collecting these things as a whole and looking for patterns.
124. 6:19Digital gardening does a great job of mapping out your interests
125. 6:22in a way that makes it easier to spot patterns.
126. 6:24it reveals something about you to you.
127. 6:26What concepts keep coming up?
128. 6:28for example, when assembling my digital garden, I noticed I gravitated
129. 6:32towards little metal boxes, pillboxes, vintage cigarette cases, etc..
130. 6:38Now I want to pull on that thread create my Seeing your interests
131. 6:42as a whole can spark an idea like what Kleon says in his book.
132. 6:45When you have a system for going back through your work,
133. 6:48you can better see the bigger picture of what you've been up to
134. 6:51and what you should do next.
135. 6:52Number four, it's a way to be online without being online.
136. 6:57There is less pressure and there's no algorithm.
137. 6:59A digital garden is not like a blogger. Instagram.
138. 7:02You don't have to publish an article or even finish thoughts.
139. 7:05You don't even have to publish it technically.
140. 7:07Digital gardening is not focused on an outcome.
141. 7:09It's driven by curiosity and its journey.
142. 7:12I also think apps are noisy between the ads and the short form videos
143. 7:16and the literal endless feed of mostly pointless
144. 7:19information, it's hard to stop and actually listen to your own thoughts.
145. 7:22Like, was that my idea or just a regurgitated idea from a grudge?
146. 7:26Idea from regurgitated idea think I underestimate the influence of a dozen
147. 7:3115 second videos saying the same thing, But this may be a just me thing.
148. 7:35So let me know your thoughts, How to use it as a creative.
149. 7:38Something I struggled with
150. 7:40and why it took me so long to adopt digital gardening, was that
151. 7:43I didn't find many public digital gardens that I could relate
152. 7:46because of its non-linear format and interconnecting structure.
153. 7:49The people who took to digital
154. 7:50gardening best were people who could code, developers, etc.
155. 7:54I considered myself a coder until I had to open up a GitHub
156. 7:58and look up how to clone a repository in order to publish my own digital garden.
157. 8:03More on that later.
158. 8:04Even at the time of this video, I haven't found many public
159. 8:07digital gardens that feature makers creatives.
160. 8:10even though I think they would benefit so much from a digital garden,
161. 8:13I did find a few and I'll make a separate Substack about
162. 8:17It wasn't until I came across Carolyn used Digital Garden that finally clicked
163. 8:21with Carolyn is an artist and writer, and I love her Substack.
164. 8:24Her Digital Garden is public, and it's a personal wiki.
165. 8:27A list of how to's, a collection of concepts, references.
166. 8:30Honestly, seeing the list of how to's that inspired me to start my own,
167. 8:35I consume so many how to videos tutorials, it's
168. 8:39so nice to compile them in a space where I can visit and navigate easily.
169. 8:42A few things you can plant in your digital garden include, Like we said, tutorials,
170. 8:46articles on business best practices, mood boards, reviews, book reports,
171. 8:52mini essays or full essays, recipes, story concepts, half formed ideas.
172. 8:58Literally anything you want.
173. 8:59If you're an artist,
174. 9:00you can use a digital garden to collect design inspiration from books and online.
175. 9:04you can document your creative process.
176. 9:06And if you're feeling up for it, show it to potential employers in an interview.
177. 9:10What I've been doing is going through my different
178. 9:11art books and taking photos of things
179. 9:13that inspire me and putting them in my digital garden.
180. 9:16So it's all in one place where I can see.
181. 9:18If you're a writer, you can collect quotes and write stories.
182. 9:21If you're a maker, It's also a great tool to write a project diary.
183. 9:25If you're working on a specific project you can write down your findings
184. 9:28on what worked, what didn't, where you bought your materials, etc..
185. 9:32I find collecting these help your future self as well.
186. 9:35In case you ever want to reiterate on
187. 9:37that project, you don't have to think, what did I buy for that project?
188. 9:40Where did I get that casted?
189. 9:42Project diaries are very useful.
190. 9:44How to start your own.
191. 9:46If you're a coder, you can build your own.
192. 9:48If not, there's a couple tools you can use.
193. 9:50Obsidian notion are just two of them.
194. 9:53There's also arena, Rome Garden, and sublime.
195. 9:55In this video, I'll talk to you about the first two
196. 9:58since they are free and you can make unlimited pages.
197. 10:01whichever you choose largely depends on your needs.
198. 10:04I like obsidian because of its simplicity.
199. 10:07It's a free app that's mostly text heavy, but they do have
200. 10:10this feature called canvas where you can map out photos.
201. 10:13If you want to publish your Obsidian Digital Garden, it is $8 a month.
202. 10:17if you want to publish online for free.
203. 10:19Like I have, you can use quartz,
204. 10:20but you'll need a little GitHub experience or at the very least an account.
205. 10:24My favorite feature is the brain map.
206. 10:27It's just so satisfying to see it fill up the more you write
207. 10:31and add to your digital garden Notion is great too.
208. 10:34It's also free and doesn't require any coding knowledge.
209. 10:37There are also digital gardening
210. 10:38templates that you can start with,
211. 10:40so you don't have to build completely from scratch.
212. 10:42What I've personally found is sometimes notion offers me too much personalization
213. 10:47and freedom that I get caught up in making it look good
214. 10:50rather than actually writing.
215. 10:51But again, it's all a so in conclusion, since digital gardening,
216. 10:57I'm actually motivated to collect sources and write my thoughts on them.
217. 11:00It's made me not only consume content thoughtfully, but
218. 11:03actually seek out and research topics that I'm interested in.
219. 11:07I want to long list of tutorials for future me to visit.
220. 11:10I want to see the patterns develop in the little brain map,
221. 11:13but those are things that come with time and tending to just like an actual garden.
222. 11:18Right now I'm working on a flipping wax signet, and it's been so cool
223. 11:22to use the Obsidian Canvas
224. 11:24feature to paste inspiration photos and map them all together.
225. 11:27I've also been journaling through my creative process with this project,
226. 11:30which you can read in my digital garden at Garden Margaret Albert.
227. 11:34You'll find that most of my original garden is about digital gardening.
228. 11:39But what can I tell you?
229. 11:40It's my current hyper fixation.
230. 11:42so much for watching this video.
231. 11:43It's been fun to do research on this.
232. 11:46I used my digital garden to research for this video.
233. 11:51I hope to create more.
234. 11:52Probably do a tour of my own digital garden in the
235. 11:56If you like this video, let me know and I'll see you in the next one.