digital garden

I stumbled onto the idea of the digital garden while trying to answer a question about Obsidian. It immediately made me think of the pre-blog web in a way that sparked my curiosity and imagination. Thinking on it further, I was reminded of commonplace books, Twine games, and self-replicating web art projects like https://trashrobot.org/. I love gardens. I wanted to try it out.

Why a "digital garden"?

When I was a young teen, I was really interested in neopagan worldviews like Wicca. (Yes, I watched The Craft a lot in this era.) This was pre-social media, pre-Web 2.0, even pre-blogging. My mom worked for a major telecom company, so we had free internet, and I loved to spend hours navigating the web as it existed then, researching neopaganism and marveling at the various ways that the web creators of the era used metaphors to help users navigate their sites. There was a poetry and a freedom to user interface design—rather than using "the blog" as their organizing strategy, these creators built labyrinths and villages and, yes, gardens of deeply interlinked evergreen content. I lost interest in neopaganism after a while, but I've never lost my fondness for that time on the web.

I miss when we treated more websites a little like text adventure games, when discovery was part of the joy of using the internet, when designers and creators didn't default to what everyone else did but embraced experimentation. In this space, I want to bring that feeling back, at least for myself if not for others.

I also appreciate the garden metaphor because I spend a lot of time thinking about how computers help or hinder our ability to be in relationship with the ecosystems around us. In 2023, I developed a multimedia authoring course on apps and ebooks themed around Shadow Libraries and Solarpunk Futures, where one of the goals was to get students doing this kind of thinking about the relationship between digital technology and "nature." I focused on solarpunk because I wanted us to find hope for the future. For me, that hope is in the possibility that we can reshape how we think about digital tech to work with, and not against, the natural world.