Garden of Infinite Possibilities
Jorge Luis Borges’ story the “Garden of Forking Paths” is set in an elaborate garden, but the real garden is a book that is structured in such a way as to allow infinite possibilities.
The connection between the metaphor of a garden and an early form of hypertext is uncanny. It makes me wonder if there is some kind of deep connection between these two ideas, maybe even on a neurological level.
Information Garden as a System
Maggie Appleton dates the first use of the term “garden” in connection to hypertext to a 1998 essay by Mark Bernstein though I place it earlier, in a 1993 paper called Enactment in lnformation Farming Bernstein in turn attributes the origin of “information farming” to Catherine Marshall’s 1991 work on Aquanet, a system to “hold your information together.”
Gardening as Data Maintenance
In 2012 Matt Caton began a series of online courses called “Gardening and Evolving Your Brain” about doing routine maintenance in TheBrain note-taking system.
Garden as an Experience Generator
In 2015 Mike Caufield produced an essay called The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral Caufield talks about a network of notes that are interlinked in such a way as to generate new ideas.
SOURCE: Maggie Appleton A Brief History of the Digital Garden
SEE ALSO
There are parallels between the origins of digital gardening and the Origin of Personal Knowledge Management
Where the idea of a “digital garden” implies a personal effort, a corporate effort might be understood as Information farming
