Hi! 🤍 I’m Francesca and this is my personal 🌱 digital garden 🌱, an attempt to join the indie web and go back to the origins of the Internet as well as keeping track of my thoughts, movies, books and everything.
About Digital Gardens
A digital garden is a collection of imperfect notes, essays, and ideas growing slowly over time. Evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing. 1
As soon as i stumbled upon this video on Youtube, something clicked inside me and I felt the urge to start my own digital garden too.
Ever since I was 5 I’d always enjoy surfing the web, link hopping on Wikipedia and finding hidden gems on the Internet. No surprise I’m a computer science student now!
But recently, with social networks becoming more and more polluted with ads, AI, and payed contents and less focused on connecting with whom you love and their interests, I started to feel demotivated, absorbed by an infinite loop of doom-scrolling in nonsense contents. But I have to say, on social networks I always find amazing things: facts, art, interesting bit of knowledge I always thought would remain in my brain. But it is not as easy as it seems.
In fact, this way of fruiting content only makes the brain passive and not capable of remembering any of this information: we need to write, take notes, discuss every tiny bit of knowledge that makes us feel stimulated within our interests.
And that’s why I decided to go against this algorithm. End this infinite loop by cultivating my own little piece of the web.
“The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.”
For some examples of Digital Gardens, see this Digital Garden Inventory.
How can this be useful?
By writing notes, you make that bit of knowledge yours: think about school classes, and how attending each lessons and taking notes helps in studying that information.
I’m a big fan of cool note taking and mind maps, so when I discovered Obsidian, the perfect tool for interlinked-note-taking, one thing led to another. For more info see this article on Second Brain system or the Zettelkasten method.
A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thoughts possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.2
About my Garden
Garden Structure
This garden will, more or less, have a very flexible structure. I get curios about a huge variety of topics, so I don’t know precisely how this will turn out.
The notes can be classified based on their “maturity”, and might be changed/improved over time. We have:
-
The sprouts 🌱
- Sprouts are newborn thoughts or concepts that still need to be explored and improved, like an embryo stage
-
The seedlings ☘️
- Seedlings are an early stage of thought, but a little bit more advanced
-
The plants 🌿
- Plants are more complex and rich thoughts, with a little more detail but not that much of information in it
-
The trees 🌲
- Trees are complete and polished notes. They most likely won’t be improved furthermore, as they reached their maximum growth.
-
The leaves 🍁
- Leaves are notes/topics that are an end in themselves. For example rough ideas that were discarded after or small topics that don’t need further exploration.
The interlinks between each note will resemble the roots of this garden, connecting each idea.
Garden Topics
The topics of this garden, as I said before, will be various and messy.
In there you can find:
- My music collection, maybe the most curated plant in this garden as it’s my primary hobby
- Videogames i’ve played or in development that i’m following
- Photographs i’ve taken, another thing that I really love
- Some university notes, taken during my studies in Computer Science and Engineering
- Various notes on random things
- Notes on books, films and other medias
- Recipes
About me
I’m a 23 years-old girl from Italy, a wannabe game developer and a computer science and engineering student.
I really am enthusiast about music, astronomy, nature and animals, physics, computer programming, art and design. But as i get easily distracted, it’s difficult for me to focus for an extended amount of time on one thing only (that’s another reason for which i’m developing this garden).
Contacts
You can find my portfolio/CV here, my Github profile here and if you have any questions/doubts or simply want to chat feel free to contact me at my email: francescaguzzi9@gmail.com
Footnotes
-
“A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history ↩
-
“Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method” https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/ ↩
