Knowledge gardens and serendipity
Should a digital garden be searchable and useful, or is there beauty in letting people explore?
From a LinkedIn exchange with Sherry Comes about knowledge gardens and how we store what we know.
I’ve been a big proponent of gardens, interconnectedness, ‘soulness’ if you will, in all other parts of my life (mostly in the realm of body-breath-voice, it kind of comes naturally there). Yet for writing, I still find myself in my rational, structured hemisphere most of the time. Funny, because my whole business runs on serendipity already.
Should a digital garden be searchable and useful? Who is my intended target audience: right now, that’s mostly me. I grew up before the searchable web (mostly gopher and usenet), and somehow the idea of letting people do their own exploring really appeals to me.
Ideas to explore:
- The tension between structure and serendipity in knowledge systems
- Not an actual taxonomy that lives somewhere, but an on-the-fly, dynamic creation of webs
- The beauty of a completely flat content collection: smart linking and ontologising instead of hierarchy
- Automating the daily iteration of linking and connecting: right now it’s manual
- Who is this garden for? And does that matter?
This seed grew into a project: knowledge-graph-for-the-garden.