Garden features

🌳 The 6 patterns of digital gardens

Web designer and anthropologist Maggie Appleton, who has written extensively about digital gardens, identified six patterns, or common features, of the multiplicity of digital gardens on the web (ca. 2021a). See the embedded infographic below for a paraphrased overview of these patterns.

🌳 Important non-technical features

🪴 Epistemic status indicators (ESI)

These are simply symbols, labels or brief statements that indicate the level of maturity or polish of a post (Appleton, ca. 2022). The brilliant thing about ESIs is that they remove the pressure from writing and publishing. If you indicate that a post is in a very early state – just the beginning of an idea – then you are freed from all expectation of polish (Zuegel, 2018). This leads to less anxiety and more writing and publishing (Hooks, n. d.).

See Figure 1 below.

🪴 Dates

Dates or other time indicators are also important (see Figure 1). These show when a post has last been written or updated, which is important in a format in which revision is an expected part. Some digital gardeners just write "Last updated about three years ago" (Appleton, ca. 2021a), to further de-emphasise the importance of chronology. As a teacher librarian, this can sometimes be annoying on the referencing front! However, I can appreciate the philosophy behind it.

🌳 Basic technical features

The most important characteristics of a digital garden are not very technically demanding.

They consist of:

• being able to return to posts and edit/develop them over time; and

• being able to create hyperlink connections between posts

(Appleton, ca. 2021a).

Happily, almost any platform will allow you to do those things; some just do it in a more polished way than others.

🌳 Nice-to-have technical features

🪴 Bi-directional links

Put simply, bi-directional links, or backlinks, automatically show you what other posts have been linked to the post you're currently on.

Bi-directional links make it easy to see the connections you're making between ideas (Carratino, 2024).

See example below (Figure 2).

Figure 2 shows that my post about the word 'haptic' was linked to in my post about 'Libraries, ideals & values'.

That reminds me of connections I've made, helping me build a network of notes and ideas that, hopefully, over time, generates new and/or enriched ideas (Le Cunff, 2022b).

🪴 Hover previews

Hover previews are the small live previews of a site that pop up when you hover over a link with your mouse (Le Cunff, 2022a) - see Figure 3 below. This can help you quickly refresh your memory of the post and make a judgment about whether you want to click on the link.