List of “digital gardners” and tooling for digital gardens. Andy Matuschak is notable in his note taking style and has influenced many PKM adherents. Jethro Kuan is the author of org-roam, a useful tool for maintaining a PKM in org-mode. Hugo Cisneros has a cool implementation of org-roam with a graph and search implemented in D3 and primitive JS search.
Since Andy’s note taking system is not public, several people within the Javascript community have attempted to recreate it using React and Gatsby, neither of these are up to date or maintained as of 2024:
Tending a Digital Garden
When adding to a personal knowledge management system, or tending to a digital garden, you can fall prey to writer’s block. A few activities that help me break the block and maintain a daily writing habit:
- Mark stub articles as “seedling”, representing empty or sparse notes. Review these periodically and add to them, at which point they can be retagged as “budding”, which is a more fleshed out state but still a work in progress, finally when a note is stable and complete, tag it as “evergreen”. In org-roam, Chris Barrett created the org-roam-review library that automates much of this process.
- Use a visualization tool, look for orphan notes/nodes, try to connect these into the larger map. If you can’t, should the note be there? If you can it may lead you to fleshing out either that orphan or the connected parent. Also some PKM tooling supports looking for unlinked references.