DigitalGarden: Home
Digital Garden Starting
Rules
- Keep hyperlinks out of the body of the writing.
- The Shallows by Nicolas Carr mentions research that shows how bad links are for reading comprehension.
- Convention for links at bottom of page about footer links to Home etc.
- Links for hyperlinks, Endnotes for other notes, glosses, digressions:
- Decide on Convetion and work with it enough for smooth use...
- Links for hyperlinks, Endnotes for other notes, glosses, digressions:
- Keep a Consisten line of links at the bottom of a page as a footer.
Digital Gardens Again
A search for the basics of ffmpeg got me to a 'gist' by 'protrolium'(Gavin Gamboa). Out of curiousity I took a look at other gists by the same author. One gist is about Tiddly Wiki and Digital Gardens.[3] I followed along the workshop lessonplan for a bit. Pressing buttons and filling forms is awkward. It's hoard to see how all the menu overhead will not get in the way of quickly noting sources and ideas and then just as smoothly tying them together for a work: some sort of stable configuration or gestalt.
The time spent downloading Tiddly Wiki's empty.html and then filling in forms was not a complete waste, even if the excersized didn't work. The table-of-contents tab for the sidebar and the tiddler should have had an added image didn't work out. The body text kept disappaearing too. The tiddler that referenced an external image was ok, but one out of three ain't good. It was good to be reminded of WikiText and how I've been hoping to implement some sort of Digital Gardening[1] with Hubzilla. [2]
This paragraph about Digital Gardens is probably worth remembering too:
I find Anne-Laure Le Cunff's definition of a digital garden succinct and elegant: a digital garden is a scalable way to transform seeds of information into original work. There is also a burgeoning movement of people who adamantly want to learn things out in the open, and document the process of their learning in real-time. This is where a digital garden can be really handy. You plant seeds (ideas, notes, journal entries), which turn into branches (through making connections between them), which eventually yield fruit (a more substantial corpus, a novel, a research paper). Feel free to explore this webring which features a few different flavors of what a digital garden can be. [3]
The metaphor of planting seeds, connecting them with branches, and having them bear fruit might be a good place to start. I feel a need for a more botanically accurate metaphor of growth. You plant a seed from which roots push down into the earth (your experience and readings) and also reach up into the sky (your elaboration and creations). Reading the paragrpahs by Gaving Gamboa and Anne-Laure Le Cunff made me think of lines from Lewis Mumford. "Living beyond your expiration date" and "Keep your levels of consumption and creation balanced"... I've seen similar sentences in Lewis Mumford's other writings, but in The Transformations of Man he writes that
Whent there is a surplus there is an obligation to create no to consume. --- Lewis Mumford in The Transformations of Man