librarypunk - 037 - Digital Gardens, Hypertext, and Donna Haraway

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Segment: Library Futures | Statement on the Association of American Publishers Suit Against the State of Maryland THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN PUBLISHERS FILES SUIT AGAINST THE STATE OF MARYLAND OVER UNPRECEDENTED ENCROACHMENT INTO FEDERALLY PROTECTED COPYRIGHTS - AAP  Maggie Appleton: A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral | Hapgood  How the Blog Broke the Web - Stacking the Bricks 🌱 My Blog is a Digital Garden, Not a Blog by Joel Hooks: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. The main relevant part is this interview with Ted Nelson: Ted Nelson in Herzog's "Lo and Behold" Shawn Wang: Learn In Public: The fastest way to learn  Donna Haraway: Staying with the Trouble Key Theories of Donna Haraway Staying With The Trouble by Donna Haraway | PDF | Cthulhu  Jay’s paper: Composting Hypertext: Digital Gardens in the Chthulucene 20211207_FeministTheory_SeminarPaper_ColbertJL.docx  https://tenthousandposts.podbean.com/e/yes-haha-yes-ft-mattie-lubchansky/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160315090512/http:/www.webword.com/moving/healing.html Zettelkasten - Wikipedia  https://wilde-at-heart.garden 

Let's make some digital compost. It's library punk. I'm Justin. I'm a scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he-him. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. My pronouns are they them.

And I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian, and my pronouns are he-him. And this week, it's just the gang. And we're going to be talking about digital gardens, which is sort of old man. And from what I understand is old man yelling at the clouds about how the internet used to be better. Yeah, basically. And everything. Yeah.

There were some people at the last minute, I was like, oh, we really should have had John on for this one. You would have. Yeah. That would have been fun. Yeah, that's a good point. Should have got some 90s internet people. The point of podcasts is to one, make friends and to two, force our current hyperfocuses onto everyone else. So that's what this episode is.

And to yell into space. Exactly. So latest hyperfocus, Jay? Yeah, I mean, it's been going on for like a year. So it's a long hyperfocus. You know, it doesn't just last like a week. So I don't know at one point it stops being a hyperfocus. So let's see.

Everything's all moved around on my board. But we do have a segment I wanted to bring up to do. I guess it's legislation one. The Association of American Publishers, have filed suit against the state of Maryland for the e-books law that was passed earlier this year, which is set to go into effect January 1st. Of course they did. They're fucking cops.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Publishing cops. They're just the worst. But the law is just that if you sell e-books, you have to also sell them in a very vague sense. You have to give fair licenses to libraries. And that's it. it doesn't really say, like, you have to offer them at, like, cheap prices.

They can still be, like, extremely expensive and exploitative. But apparently that's too much. But it just to be on par exploitative with, you know, your average consumer. Yeah. Oh, see, if the publishers don't get to get to decide what exploitation is or not, then it's automatically illegal, right? I guess. But it's, you know, I think it's, I think probably COVID has forced a lot of people to realize,

like how much digital terms of service are just completely different from actual physical sales of things. And maybe like the Netflixification of everything is kind of making people realize that, you know, these are, there's no real laws about any kind of digital ownership, which I think NFT people are going to figure out pretty soon that there are no laws about what you own digitally. That is one, fuck NFTs, but there's one perk about the discourse. it is people talking about digital scarcity. I literally discoursed about this on Twitter today,

which means I need to go donate to the Kellogg Strike Fund. But like this whole idea of like it's a digital thing. It literally is infinite. It's limitless. Why are we enforcing scarcity on it? I'll never understand. People are cops. That has to be like the number one question I always got when I was doing like

ebook help. It was just like, why do I, why do I have to wait for this? It's just digital. Can I have it can't like I have a checked out of this? same time as somebody else. And I'm like, well, you could, but cops essentially. Over there, said no. Yeah. I think I was working with some faculty recently, and they were just asking, like, how our e-books work. And they were assuming they were way more restrictive. They assumed we had, like, a public library checkout system. I was like, no, as long as someone doesn't literally have

it open, then someone else can get into it. So it's like immediate. There's no checkout stuff. And that even depends on, like, how many seats you've purchased for it. Yeah, I mean, generally it should be available as long as no one's actively looking at it, even if it's only one seat. But it might take a few minutes for the – it just depends on the vendor, which is the worst part. And even the license, like, often it'll be like, well, which one do I pick when I pick this book? Do I get the unlimited license for like $200 more? Or if it's for some niche course that, you know, isn't going to be offered that often, but it's still important. Do I get like a three-seat license, right?

Or the unlimited license is like the same price. And like there's no difference. So sometimes we've had to go back into our collection development policy and just be like, if it's unlimited for $10 more, just get the unlimited, even if we don't, even if it's not for a course. But I don't know, I hope there are more laws like this. I hope this doesn't go anywhere because there's similar law in New York. I don't know if they've sued over that one. But I think there was some updates about it this morning.

It's just that the suit is gone ahead. They've actually filed it, I guess. I hope the APP or AAP or whatever just fucking. fails enormously. And I hope authors don't, you know, become bootlickers for this round as well. God. If you're an author listening to this, stop being a bootlicker for your publisher. They're not your friend. Anyway, that's legislation. So, Digital Gardens, Jay put this episode together. And I didn't know that this was something I was looking into.

I had heard of some of the things like Obsidian that I played around with, but I didn't know about the term digital gardening. So Jay, what is a digital garden? Sure. So some of the things that you've already mentioned, like the tools like Obsidian, those are often used for digital gardening, but that is not inherently only what they are for. But to be sort of a very, like a very sort of basic definition of a digital garden is a digital garden is a digital garden is,

is a digital form of note taking. And you can either make it public or private, though they tend to be more publicly, people will make them websites, where instead of following like a blog format, where all of the posts you write are kind of fleshed out, like you've thought about it, you've written a sort of fully fledged narrative

about something you are sharing your thought with the world. And then it's like sorted in like reverse sort chronological order, which when you start reading about digital gardens, people throw that around like a slur. It's kind of funny. You sort of post ideas like when they're like seedlings. And this is where the garden metaphor comes in. So what you are posting is more just like,

oh, hey, I learned about this cool concept. And I might want to look into it more, like look into it more. I have this idea. And the way that you construct the garden is you do like a bunch of those little like seeds, these saplings, right? And then as you go, you sort of start seeing how they connect to one another. And you also sort of allow those connections to evolve, to grow into other ideas. You let the original ideas themselves grow,

like you tend to it like a garden. And another aspect of it is they tend to not have any sort of hierarchical structure for how like you access it. So instead of going to like a blog index, like a blog archive where it's like I want to see things from this year or I want to see things on this tag or something which some people do provide. It's more like you navigate by clicking sort of like Wikipedia style links between notes. So if I've got a note about digital gardens, there might be a linked word in there about how they're similar to Zetelkastin. And if you click that, then it will take you to the note about Zetelkastin. Like we've all wasted hours doing this on Wikipedia, think of digital gardens as like that kind of thing.

But instead of being these like encyclopedia articles, it's just someone's like working notes about something. And so it's people sharing unpolished ideas that are always in flux and then not putting any structure to them and letting people navigate those notes through contextual paths rather than forcing a timeline structure onto them. And so then the garden metaphor is just more a metaphor for that structure and then sort of how ideas grow and you have to tend to them and you make paths in your garden and like that kind of idea is a very sort of oversimplified version of what they are. When I was reading about it and I really liked the path metaphor kind of thing, but it made me think of I forget what they're called when like you create paths

but then people like cut corners on them. Oh yeah. They talk about that in UX design. Yeah, like where you can see where people are actually walking or whatever. It's kind of the same thing, except that those paths are actually the links between ideas. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like in one of the things,

it's like you should create paths through your garden that people will actually want to follow. I believe it's in the Joel Hooks piece. My digital garden is a, or my blog is a digital garden, not a blog. He talks about how when people search the internet, they're not searching based off of chronological time most of the time. They're searching based off of a topic and then how things are related to that topic.

And so it makes sense that, I mean, again, we do this with Wikipedia. People navigate Wikipedia based on contextual relation and not necessarily based on when something was posted. So exactly. The garden metaphor also comes from this keynote speech. the garden in the stream a techno-pastoral or something where again like the garden is this very like unstructured you walk through it and I would love to analyze this through like the medieval ideas of gardening one day where it's very rigid and structured versus like in Edwardian period where it loosened up of it where like things are based off of paths and like it's the web as topology or the web as space versus things like Twitter or Facebook where it's a stream of information so paths versus is a one sort of where you have to follow a stream backwards or forwards to get to where you're going is another place where that metaphor comes from. And the one thing that started making sense to me, because I was, when I was playing around

with the obsidian, it was because people were telling me about how they were taking notes. And since I have like ADD, I have like a junk journal and I'm always taking notes constantly like at work. I have work journal. And then I have like a junk journal and a work junk journal, which is where I have to throw things so I don't lose them. Same. Yeah.

So I use my work jump journal a lot more than my personal ones. But like for work, I'm just constantly putting stuff in there. And I always want to do this like in my personal life. And so what I've actually kind of done is just more like yelling notes at Siri most of the time. And one thing that started to make sense is I was reading about digital gardens is you don't really put like those kind of notes in a digital garden. you put slightly more thought-out notes in a digital garden.

And then like the stage beyond that would be like final published articles, final posts. When you're ready to move on from something and be like, okay, it's done. I want to put a cap on this and it's more or less finished. Yeah, like often people who make digital gardens, they often do it as sort of a digital version of, I mentioned this really like it's Zetelkastin, but they're also kind of, they could be like personal wikis or commonplace books. And so for those who aren't familiar,

Zetelkastin, that word just means slipbox in German. And it's a fairly old technique, but it really gained traction through this one, I believe German scholar, Niklaus Luman, who published like thousands of articles when he was alive. And what he would do is he had this, like,

library card catalog thing, like a file cabinet thinks that, up and he would have all these drawers with like index cards like note cards in them and any time he had like an idea and like an atomic idea so not connected immediately to anything else like not a blog post but just like oh i have this idea or this concept very short or i just read this article here's something i want to say on it and he would just like put that on one of the little note cards and then he would create contextual links from like that card to other cards and he would of like an index and it's like, okay, I think this card relates to this card in this door.

So I'm going to mark that link on there. And then I'll take that card that I want to link it to and mark that link on there as well. So often that's how people will use digital gardens is they'll do it as like a digital subtle custom system where again, it's not like, oh, here's this like fleeting idea that I need to just make sure I have out of my head so that my head's clear for other things. But it's more like, oh, here's a topic I want to explore or here's something interesting I learned today or here's a quote that I like or here's something like that like there's the seed some people have like a seed box and then they'll take things in their seed box and be like okay what do I want to make a sapling and then that is what will

make it to the digital garden the more like this isn't the initial spark this is the spark after I've you know it's not just like a thought in my head that I need to get out of the way often like things like obsidian or Rome or these other tools will often have like an automatic daily note that it will set up and often people will use the daily notes as a way of just what you're talking about like a junk journal. These are just all the thoughts I'm having during the day that I want to make sure I get written down but that might be taking away from something else and then they'll look through that and go okay which of these can I discard and then which of these can I make a, you know, actually put in the garden and start developing more.

Yeah, that's basically my notes app is I'll just yell something at my phone, while I'm like outside having a smoke or something, and I'll be like, okay. And then if I have to get it done, then I just delete it. But if there's anything like if it's for work or if it's like something I want to work on for the podcast or something like, oh, email so-and-so about coming on or something. Yeah, like I often use, I have the drafts app as my like, I just need to write something down real quickly or like that's where I take meeting notes. But my digital garden is more like, oh, I'm going to read this book and these are the notes

that I'm taking while I'm reading it. Or here's a topic I just learned about that it might be, I might connect it to something. Like, I think one of the reasons they appeal to me so much is like, yeah, I might be a metadata librarian, but the research that I do tends to be like, I tend to not be of the, here's the thing I did, let me write an article about it type of researcher. That's bad. That just isn't what interests me. I like doing presentations like that,

but I don't necessarily like writing that. I like to get way more theoretical in my writing. And a lot of the theory that I bring in tends to be from outside of librarianship. And I'm also working on a second master's degree right now. And so I'm always liking to see how the sort of interdisciplinaryness of my work and my thinking, how those can relate to each other and sort of doing notes in a way that encourages making those links with other things really helps me be like, oh, I can totally bring this into this. And I never would have made that association otherwise.

That's also just what grad school does to your brain is it makes you constantly like in that state. Because I was reading your paper the other day. And I'm like, man, I don't have to think like this anymore. And I'm really glad that I'm just not constantly on. And I can just read a book and be like, okay, that was interesting. But I'm not taking like 10 pages of notes on it. I mean, I took pages on that. I took notes on that Oscar Wild and Anarchy book.

even though I didn't have to do anything with that. It was just a nice, especially like I also have, you know, ADD. And sometimes when I read things, I will not remember a single thing I read. But it can be helpful to, like, force me to understand what I just read if I do like a little. And here's what I thought about it right afterwards. And it helped me understand that book a lot more because I did that. This is an all ADHD podcast. Exactly.

I pretty much do the same thing, Justin. and I have one note, Microsoft OneNote, because I can easily use it on my phone. And I started a personal one recently, especially when I was doing like the Library Freedom Project crash courses. And I'm like, this is just not going to work. And then when I started reading some of the articles, I was like, oh, oh, this is what I want. And I downloaded Obsidian like a million years ago and didn't do anything with it. So I'm excited to try some of that. But this is a super cool idea, like space.

Yeah, like, I think like the fact that the three of us all have ADD, it brings me to something else I really like about the digital gardening idea. So obsidian doesn't force you into this, but Rome research does, as well as org Rome, which is what I do, because I'm a dork who discovered Emacs and fell in love with it. But one of the things about Digital Gardens, like I said, is that they don't, they tend. Again, there's sort of no hard and fast rules. People will absolutely have organization in their gardens for people to search them. But, you know, it tends to be a non-hierarchical thing.

And that reflects when you're taking the notes as well. Like Rome does not allow you to make folders. Sometimes people will get around that by having like a note that serves like an index for other notes, but something that I always have trouble with, like, in my digital organization, as it were, is getting too caught up with structure and, like, sorting and filing. And like, and this sounds weird being a person who just meditate for like a blipping. But like I'm awful at doing digital organization. Like, I might be able to set something up, but then actually using that system I'm terrible with. So being freed of that worry about, okay, what folder do I put this in? How do I tag this, what do I do? Instead of just being able to like, take a note and then relate it to other things, knowing that it's a computer and I can search, like, do searching for it and it like will be able to search through the words and stuff that I've used. That was so freeing to me, because I've always been a bad note taker. And I've just like never been able to, like, I tried one note

and I hated it because there's just too much structure to it that I can never follow or keep set up. right. So that's one thing about like the digital gardening sort of mindset and then the tools that people often use that I just really like is this non-hierarchical like file structure. And there was like a kind of annoying article that came out like in the whatever a few months ago talking about how professors were worried because students didn't know how to organize things on their computer. Like everything was saved at the desktop because people are so used to using like Google Drive. And so they're not making folders and stuff anymore. And like, yeah, I can see how like in a computer science class, that might be a problem because you have to know how to like access things via the

command line and stuff. But the points that the students were making that, you can just do searches and it will bring things up that like you don't necessarily need that folder structure anymore. I was like, yeah. So that's one reason why I like the tools is that it frees me from having to worry about keeping an organization system and like, that integrity of that system. It just, I don't have to worry about that anymore. So that's another reason I really like them. Well, and like, you know, oh, these students just search stuff.

It's like, well, that's what you do with Google these days too. Like, you know, of course these students are just searching something, you know. Well, yeah, let me Google that for you. Do you guys remember that link that like people would be like, oh, you, like, you don't, why are you asking this stupid question? and let me Google that for you, and then they, like, link it to, like, the Google search. It's like, of course. So passive aggressive.

So passive aggressive. But, like, of course, like, that's how people are doing it now. So. But did either of you guys ever try bullet journaling? Yeah. And I got too obsessed. Like, I could, the, the rules and the structure of it. Because I would always be like, but wait, what page do I put the index on?

What, how do I organize this thing? Like, I would get so obsessive with the process of setting it up. And then when I would go to go. use it, I could never actually use it because in a use case that I would bring to it would never fit this sort of rigid system set up. I hated it. Also a bullet journal failure, yeah. I never learned the rules for it. I was just already doing like daily journals for work and stuff anyway. So I like the junk journal a lot more where it's just one really long document that I throw things into and then I have to organize it later, then I'll do that. But that's why

I just use Google Docs for a lot of things, which is, you know, if I, could find the right tool for digital gardening. It could probably change a lot of things. But one thing about digital gardening is it's not meant to be like low effort or automated. It's meant to take you back to a time in the web where things were more manually coded. So I think like you can't expect it to like solve the problems easily. But it's like if I could get something that was like the right mix of like the amount of time I need. to spend on it and the amount of stuff that I would throw into it,

I think it would work really good for me. Yeah, like something that is a known problem of the whole concept is that most of the people who do them are software developers, because often the tools required for them, or at least the tools required to make them public, require you to at least be comfortable with GitHub or with making static sites or working with markdown files. if you're just keeping it on your own computer

making like a private garden, tools like obsidian and Rome and stuff are a little easier, but exactly what you said, Justin Lee, even with that sort of like, if you don't know how to code and if you're just wanting,

like, this is a way of a different way of taking notes and relating to information and how you like relate ideas and stuff, the purpose of the garden metaphor and even of doing like a Zetel Koston or something is not that you write it

and then never do anything with it. Like it is meant to be something that you tend to and revisit. And so again, it's not just this like dump it and forget it type of mindset. It is meant to be something that you, like a lot of people will have like the spaced repetition built into it where they'll get some sort of plug in to their obsidian

or they'll use onky like flash cards where every once in a while like it will bring them a random note that they made however long ago so they can revisit it. So exactly, it's not meant to be a hands-off. You can reduce some of the amount of tech expertise that you need to get in them if you don't want to make it necessarily public. But if you're truly going to do the garden idea, it does require attending to, like a garden.

You can't just plant something and then expect not to take care of it, right? Yeah, and if you're going to build like the bi-directional linking, like you have to go back and manually, like, link back to things constantly. But the post by Amy Hoy was really interesting because what they said was before everything was blog types, where everything was like chronological. It was a table of contents model. And what they said was it was like everyone who was making a webpage, a homepage was like an amateur reference librarian. So it's like if it's like, if it's like, quirky amateur research librarians. Yeah. And so it was like everyone was creating links back to different topics. And you would constantly, like, there was no point at putting anything at the top of the page because of a blog. And then people who wanted to do daily blogs would have to go back in and code every day. Here's the new page. Here's the new hyperlink. And there's a lot of manual hyperlinking. And so because that style of daily journaling took off, then you get.

kind of the first thing that makes everything timeline oriented, which is movable type. And it was kind of the first large content management system that people started using, which I never really heard of it, but I mean, it's more or less WordPress. Yeah, like the thing I like and both have criticisms of that Amy Hoy piece is that they're absolutely right in that like before like, you know, people had a lot of control over what they wanted their homepages. to look like.

You had all the annoying gifts and people would like sort of more like curate things to put on their home pages. And the time that they put it in didn't really, that wasn't the important part. They were timeless. But then like the daily journaling started and we get movable type.

And that forces, you know, all of a sudden, then people don't have to do all that coding themselves. You know, with movable type, you just, it's a whizzy bag and you fill in forms as it does it for you. And that both takes away the barrier, of entry, which, you know, I argue that, you know, she's like, oh, it was so much better before

this because then people can make whatever they wanted. I'm like, yeah, but people still had to know how to do HTML and CSS and maybe JavaScript, which HTML and CSS aren't like necessarily hard, but there's still a barrier of entry to make something really look the way you want it to and function the way you want it to. And so having a software that takes that out, yes, it forces you into a certain paradigm and you lose a lot of control, but then it reduces the barrier of entry. And then because that barrier of entry gets removed, more people start using that. And then that's how this becomes the dominant paradigm is because, you know, all the people who didn't or couldn't learn how to like write HTML and CSS and JavaScript by themselves,

suddenly there's this tool that they can use. Of course there's going to be more that are that way. Like, duh. Yeah, it was just the idea of like building every page manually and then hyperlinking everything manually. So even people who weren't wanting to do daily journals were also just using the CMS because like it was a lot less work. Yeah, exactly. Like people saw that this was taking a lot of the work out of it. So even the people who weren't necessarily wanting to do the blog type, it would even move into that direction. Because it gets just like you said, you don't have to then worry about that link upkeep.

any anymore and doing that manually yourself. Yeah, I don't know. I think I don't really remember doing much of this. I think by the first time I made my first website in middle school, this would have been 2002, 2001 when I made my first website. So I don't remember what I was using, but it was something like anyone could throw up a bunch of Dragon Ball Z gifts. And like that was what you put on your,

I don't think it was Angel Fire, but it was like something that was really popular at the time. Yeah, it's like before I got a MySpace, I found like one of those like make a free website things and you could like put all sorts of stupid shit in it. But then MySpace like, and that's how I learned HTML and CSS was I made my own MySpace layouts, right? Generations upon generations. Generations.

Yeah. Well, mine was making like AIM profiles. I think that was when I first started using HTML was AIM profiles. But Amy Hoy's piece was kind of like the whole moving things, moving everything chronological is kind of like ruined everything forever because then you had social media come along and that was chronological. And then Facebook was chronological and Twitter's now chronological. And now they want to get away from it. But instead of doing it manually by people saying here, look at this, it's done by algorithm. So you have even less control.

Right. Like, it's still forcing the stream model onto people, like in the Mike Coughfield piece. It's taking away the forced chronological, but it's still forcing the stream model onto people. Yeah, like, I like how, you know, it's, they forced the time, the chronological stream on us and then immediately took it back. And now everybody's pissed off that it doesn't do that anymore, right? God, like, so many people complain, like, I just want my Twitter to be in order. I'm one of those people has one of the major reasons

I still use Tumblr's because like it's chronological and I can keep it that way and that makes it really fun when like things are happening like God you remember when Destiel went canon in Spanish like that was a fun night on Tumblr Yeah I mean I was complaining about this the other day

about how you know I miss everything being RSS but Amy Hoy's piece was like actually RSS was kind of of a bad thing because everyone wanted to, or maybe it wasn't Amy Hoy. Actually, I'm also, I'm confusing this with a podcast I listened to the other day, which is 10,000 posts. And Maddie Lopchansky, who is a cartoonist for the nib, you've probably seen their work. And I'll link to that episode. But they were talking about like the old days of web comics and like getting into people's web rings. And like sometimes you could even get paid to be on certain,

some of these networks. And they were saying how RSS was kind of a bad thing because then you had to make sure that your site had an RSS feed because that's how everyone was viewing your comics, was in an RSS feed instead of going to your page where they would like buy your merch or get ad revenue. And then as RSS went away, it was kind of even harder to get people to come to your website. And so now it was like you eventually had to give in and start posting it on Instagram and and Twitter. And how it takes away more control from artists and it allows things to be pulled out of context. And it takes away all of the context, which is like what digital gardening is all about.

So that's why I kept overlapping this in my mind. But it was really good interview. Yeah. Like especially you bring up web rings. Like web rings are actually becoming quite popular in digital gardening spaces because there's this one. and I'd have to look it up. It's on, it's probably my GitHub somewhere. But there's this one web ring that's very popular right now

with people who have personal wikis. And like these people are also all very like very big mastodon users as opposed to like Twitter people. Because they're very into like this federated space. But it's like the XXV something web ring. And it's made for people who do personal wiki. So, of course, a lot of people who make digital gardens that get onto this web ring, even people who are like digital artists will do it as well.

And one of the rules of being on this web ring is that like to access your site, like someone should be able to access your site without having JavaScript enabled on their computer. Like they want it to be like a mostly text-based thing. Like they don't want it weighed down with the scripting and coding and stuff. So it's very much this like let's return to the old school web kind of thing, which I have some criticisms of. I talk about those in my paper if we want to start bringing in Donna Hare away or whatnot. But I do have some criticisms of this like let's go back to the web the way it used to be mindset that I see a lot of people who have digital gardens or who write about them, the way that they tend to talk about them in their purpose. Yeah, I always wonder about that kind of nostalgia.

Like, you know, it seems slightly suspect to me, kind of no matter what the subject is. But one of the things, I don't remember if it was in the notes or if I just linked out to a million things like you do on Wikipedia and etc. But talked about how there's the garden and the stream and then added in the campfire, which I thought was really interesting because you see a lot of that on, on like, like social media, like the campfire as sort of the semi-closed or closed space where you just kind of your personal junk journal, but like with other people. So like your discord. Yeah, it's like this cozy web concept. Yeah. It's like the place where you're the most comfortable and also like semi-privatized because there are people who like tweet or who like treat Twitter that way because

they only really follow and, you know, and have followers who are like personal friends and stuff. And then like one of their tweets will get popular and suddenly the whole world is like criticizing their exact like way they put it and all of that kind of stuff. It just reminded me of that and how like there's that that balance between you know you can create the functionality of something like Twitter but you can't really control how people are actually going to use it, you know, kind of thing. Right. And like bringing up the sort of campfire concept too is actually another criticism I have of digital gardens, not in their ethos, but in the current technology and the way that we use them. So one of the things you bring up about the campfire is that the campfire

then requires and assumes a communal aspect. Like you're not just like a people, people can visit your garden, but it can also be a private thing that you do, whereas the campfire sort of, sort of is a connotation of the space that you sit around with with other people and you're sharing it with them. And I feel like a lot of digital gardening and digital gardeners, like, especially like one of the things I bring up, and it's very popular in digital gardening spaces, is the concept of like learning in public. Like if you're going to be sharing these notes before they're like fully formed, like blog post type ideas, then why not you do that as a way of like sharing your learning process? Because there are other people who are teaching themselves and

learning things as well. And so there's already this like inherent like communal aspect of digital gardening. I'm just thinking about how other people are going to use the information that you're putting out there and communicate with it. And yet, digital gardens are still so like, they're not Wikipedia. There's, if I want to, like, say if Justin had a digital garden and I want to link to one of his posts that he makes, I can do that, but then like the bidirectional link that's going to tell somebody on his page on that note itself that I'm linking to it, that's not going to be automated or anything. Like there's not going to be that path back like there is on, I mean, even Wikipedia doesn't really necessarily do this where it doesn't provide that path back.

So like until there's this truly like federated space where these are all sort of in the same thing or that bidirectional linking is automated, they can be community spaces. but there's nothing that's forcing them to be, whereas these like cozy campfire type web spaces are actually taking that idea of we should make this communal community and actually putting that into practice more so than people hoping people will visit their spaces. Funny, the guy who like invented hypertext and hypermedia and hyperlinks and all this,

he actually wanted hyperlinks to act in that bidirectional way. his name's Ted Nelson. He's a Chad. I'm like, obsessed with him right now. Please nobody tell me if he's getting into crypto or anything. I don't want my heart to be broken. He also was like one of the first to think about like, what did we do about like dildos and technology? And I'm like, thank you, Ted Nelson for your service. But he originally imagined like when you linked to something, like in a hypertext document, that that link wouldn't be dead. It would always bring you back to where you wanted to be if you wanted. Like his version of dead links was not a link that doesn't work anymore, but a link that takes you to a dead end where there's nothing that

helps you get back except for your browser's back button. Right. So Ted Nelson is cool. Shout out to Ted Nelson. But yeah, that's one of my major critiques of Digital Gardens is they preach, you know, they talk a big game about community and communal and people visiting, but then there's still these spaces where like there's nothing that enforces that community element. Yeah. Did Ted Nelson do the self-healing links thing? I wrote a chapter about internet archiving, but it was a while ago, but it was like

links that heal themselves or something. It was about avoiding dead lengths. But yeah, all these people have always been worried about like link rots and reference rot and stuff like that. And so. Well, it's not even like links that don't work anymore. It's just like if I, you know, if I am on a web page and I click. click a link that takes into another web page.

There's nothing then that takes me back to the web page I was just on, except for my browser's back button. And so the way that Ted Nelson originally imagined the way that hyperlinks would work, is that that sort of bidirectional link of, oh, hey, here's other links to this note that's like at the bottom of some pages on digital gardens or if he used Rome or Obsidian, where it shows you what else links to that. Like, that was the way he wanted the web to work, period.

And that's not a default anymore. So that's what he means by dead lengths. It's just a link that takes you somewhere and doesn't allow you to come back to it. It's a lot of one to many relationships. Exactly. Not incorporating the many to many. Yeah. But I mean, it makes a lot of sense in terms of like library world because we always want data to link back to things and like interlink and federate.

Yeah, that's like I think one reason why I'm surprised this hasn't gotten more into the library world. I mean, yeah, there's obviously the software developer. kind of techy aspect of it. But just the way that it, like when you're, even if you're just using one of these note-taking apps that digital gardeners tend to use, but aren't using it to like make a garden or anything, just the way it using a tool,

the philosophy of it and then the way that that forces you to create information and interact with information and even interact with the information of others is sort of vastly different than what we might be used to otherwise. And so just as information professionals and people who think about how information is interacted with and organized, like, as a living, like I find them fascinating just as a paradigm of how we interact with information and thinking about that interaction. Did either of you ever read everything as miscellaneous? No, I've heard of that. No. I think it was published, like, I think it was like 2008.

I don't remember, but I read it several years ago. talked a lot about like fulxominy and like how the taxonomy of the internet I don't know if either of you ever used Delicious, which was like Oh, I remember delicious, yeah. And basically you talked about like

the use of tags on the internet and how basically, no matter how structured you made anything, everything could essentially be miscellaneous and how in like libraries there's like you have to pick one place to put that book. Like you can't have

the same book on multiple shelves physically and how the digital world could start to break away from that and have the potential to do things with that, but kind of never really did. And this was, yeah, like the late odds. So it's really interesting to have read that. That had a really, like, big influence on my internet thinking. And then to now where we're like all fire hosed. And there's none of that curation sort of aspect, you know? Yeah.

One, I would love to read that because, yes. But two, that's actually, so with some of the, especially the people who's Rome and Obsidian, there's certain ways that people will still want to organize their notes. And like, especially with people who use Obsidian, there's this like linking your thinking concept where people will have maps of content. And like I said, without Rome, people will sometimes, like, create a note in their Rome that will then have sort of like to serve as an index where it's like, here's a link to this. People will do that, but like with entire ideas, but just because something is linked in one doesn't mean it can't be linked in another. And like, there's this digital

scarcity thing again, right? Like, just because a book can only be classified as one thing, even then it can still have multiple subject headings. But here in like a digital space, something can truly be in more than one place at once. Like it can be an index here, but it can be in an index at here as well. So maybe as a metadata person, that's another reason why I like digital gardens is they sort of force you to get out of this like something can only be one thing at one time or be somewhere at one place and one time aspect. Yeah, I did a lot of research into Phoconomy for my thesis because I was looking at like queer subject headings and whatnot as like, how do we fix Library of Congress?

Because that's when like Phocotonomy research was still, was kind of hedging out. But yeah, please like put that in a note or something because I want to read that book now or article or whatever it was. So do you want to get into Donna Haraway? Sure. I'll go into it briefly and quickly. So Donna Haraway, so I wrote my, probably one of the reasons why we're talking about this is I recently, so I'm working on a second degree right now because I have to. And I just took like a feminist theory seminar.

And for the final paper, I wrote about digital gardens through a framework of Donna Harrow's book, staying with this. Troublemaking canon the Cthulhu scene. And for those who aren't familiar with Donna Harroway, she actually got her start in like zoology. Like she has degrees in English zoology and I believe philosophy. And so she does a lot of like sort of like anthropological philosophy sometimes. But she's probably most well known for her like cyborg feminism. Like she wrote the cyborg manifesto, which is not talking about like,

like literal like ghost in the shell cyborgs, although I did write a paper in college about ghosts in the shell and the cyborg manifesto and it's why I'm a cataloging librarian. But anyway, that's another story for another time. Basically, her big thing with the cyborg manifesto is that instead of like resolving these contradictions within feminist theory, especially to do with like technology and nature and technology is bad and masculine and nature is good and feminine, as was like very common eco-feminism at the time. She's like, instead of resolving these contradictions,

let's make assemblages between them, let's make cyborgs, Frankenstein's monsters with them. Like nature technology is not a binary where things can only be one or the other. Things can be this Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg of both. You know, someone, man and woman, is not this moral binary hierarchy.

Human machine is not a moral, binary hierarchy, right? That's what most people know Donna Haraway for. But she's also very big into sort of taking those ideas and putting them into more eco-feminism. And that's what her book staying with the trouble is about where the Cthulhu scene is for sort of proposed metaphorical new geological epoch to sort of instead of the Anthropocene, which is here is a way of looking at the impact that humans, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have had on the planet. And instead of the capitalist scene, which is like, oh, by the way, this is because of capitalism, instead of just going, this happened, the Cthulhu scene is sort of a way to

make us not just think about, well, this is why this has happened, but what do we do with it? And then thinking about the time over how that happens and how you stay with the trouble of something. So instead of like exterminating everything that came before, you live with it. She does a lot of these like putting like hyphens like something hyphen with. So live with, stay with, die with. Where I said of like resolving these contradictions and instead of exterminating everything, you live with your trouble, you live with everyone around you, you live with your companion species on this earth and you work with them. And you realize that like, yes, we're working for the present, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be fixed now. And so

we're also going to die with it. It's a very interesting, like, eco-feminism book. I do have my criticisms of it because she gets into some light eugenics, even though she recognizes that that's what she's doing. She still talks about it, and we were all like, Donna when we read this in my class. But the way that she talks about, like, nature versus technology and how she views, like, how we work together and how, like, the metaphor of tentacles, like, she calls it Cthulucine for a reason.

But she also hates HV. Lovecraft and takes, she's like, no, don't think about HV Lovecraft while you're reading my book. God damn it. I'm like, okay, Donna, sorry. This sort of like tentacular thinking of everything is connected to everything and like to sort of think about where things come from and how they're related. You know, how are we related to nature? How are we related to other species?

This is a really great chapter where she talks about hitting menopause and also her dog going through a problem where they both have to take estrogen medicine, but for some reason, the kind that they need isn't made anymore. So they have to go to these bioavailable ones where they still make it out of pregnant horse urine. And so there's this fascinating chapter talking about how she's connected with the horses and how she's connected with her dog and the capitalist ethics of using horses to get this medicine and everything. It's fascinating. Go read it. But part of this is this sort of like way of thinking about how everything is connected with everything else. Nothing is of itself, right?

Nothing is self-made. Everything is made with. That's a huge concept of Donnas. And so when I was like writing about Digital Garden, like, as we were reading this book, I'm like, oh my God, like it would be perfect to analyze digital gardens through these theoretical frameworks. Because like there were like so many pictures of like string figure like Cat's Cradle type string games. in the book. And so many people with Digital Gardens will make like knowledge graphs, like graph networks of all of their notes as nodes to show how all their notes are connected. And I put that

in my paper. Like I did like, at least in my proposal, I did like a screenshot of my digital garden and then a screenshot of one of the pieces of art Donna puts in her book to be like, see, it's the same thing. So I talk about how like this tentacular thinking, this way of linking everything together to show that nothing exists in a vacuum. And, how we connect everything. But another interesting metaphor she uses. And the book is that of compost. And again,

I was going to be like digital garden composting. So she kind of dislikes the framework of post-humanism, even though she gets labeled as a post-humanist a lot because of cyborg feminism. But to her, like post-humanism, and for those who don't know, post-humanism can actually mean quite a few things. It doesn't just like,

it can mean either like extinction event, either on purpose or accidental, where we are literally now post human beings being on this planet or some sort of evolution of humanity, probably with technology, so that we are post humanity as we know it now. And that's how we most often see it in like the cyborg sense. And Donna doesn't like that because it encourages the sort of wiping out what came before mindset and also takes any sort of responsibility or like, why is this happening or how out of it. And so, she and I believe her husband or her partner came up with the concept of instead of being post-human it is humans as compost which I'm like this is goofy but I love it keep going I'm with you Donna where like with compost it's purposeful you have to put things in your compost that are going to work with it and you have to tend with it and then through this like throwing in refuse and all of the stuff and keeping the conditions right then it creates like through this dying with then things can live with it. So it's perfect for her weird Cthulhu metaphor of what we have to do for the environment, right?

And so with Digital Gardens, this idea of like a lot of times it's like learning in public and like putting in like putting in ideas that aren't fully formed yet. And like instead of just like, okay, I don't like the way that the web is now or the way I interact with information now and I want it to be this way. and instead of just expecting that to happen and wiping out what came before it, it's instead this purposeful, no, I'm going to put this content out there and I'm going to interact with the content of others and the way that I want to see. And then we all as a community have to work together to make sure these are the ideal conditions for this to happen. But again, a major, oh, sorry, go ahead, someone I'm muted. That was me.

A lot of this just, it's kind of a tangent, but a lot of this really reminded me of like sort of this concept of the lack of, how do you say this word, like genuineness on the internet and how like the stream in particular really contributes to that. There was this video essay that I watched a long or a while ago about a particular YouTuber Jenna Marbles. I don't know if either of you are familiar with her. Oh yeah. She was, well yeah, most people are how she was like, it was the last genuine like journey you could see on the internet because she had videos that stretched back, you know, like 12 years or something. So you really could see her as a person, how she evolved. So it was like, but because there was some problematic content and, you know,

all of that stuff, you know, she took all of it down. So there's no easy way to see how genuinely people's thinking evolves on the internet with the stream concept. You have to really go digging to see how somebody thought of something, you know, five years ago, if that even exists still on the internet. So, yeah, like the digital garden as sort of that space where you can grow ideas and people can help you grow ideas. It seems like a really good way to kind of contribute against that sort of stream, lack of evolution and genuineness when it comes to the internet. and like how that affects information literacy too. Yes. Because like this was this was wrong then.

This is wrong now in a lot of ways. But like, yeah, the contextualness just gets lost. Yeah. Like, especially with the Jenna Marbles thing. Like she's a millionaire. She's fine. Like, because I remember when that all went down. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, you know, like I'm bummed too, but she's fine. But like totally. Like something that Donna Harrow talks about in her book is this concept of staying with the trouble, right? Like, you don't just exterminate or do an extinction event on what came before. You live with it and you acknowledge it and you go, okay, what do we do about this? And exactly in this like this like stream model, which stream versus garden, I also don't want to create that as like a good bad binary of like stream

being bad, garden being good. Stream has its place. But also like the exactly what you're talking about where like we don't allow time to exist. on the internet anymore. Everything is the present. So if something exists from your past emerges, that is still the present. And people think that it's still that way instead of acknowledging that you were a person who was grown. And I don't say this is a way to like excuse shitty things people have done. But you're exactly right that like, you know, she's one of those people that like her, so much of her adult life is documented on YouTube. Of course she's changed as a person. Right. Like you want to be a different person when you're 30.

than when you were when you were 20. Right. Right. And I know Lindsay Ellis has talked about this as well with her video on like YouTube and like manufactured authenticity. Because there's like, you know, blogs and blog and like bloggers and stuff. And and then there's people who do video essays and people assume that the way you are on YouTube is the way you are in real life. And but yeah, exactly with like digital gardening and like the learning in public. A lot of that also like comes into like a lot of people will bring up like the way people interact with each other.

on GitHub as a model for digital gardening actually. It's like, you always submit issues or you do pull requests and like you do your own version of the code and do it where it's like it's okay that your code is messed up. Someone will fix it or suggest improvements on it. Like people have made like digital garden terms of services where one of the main things is reminding people that like the person who's gardening, like the person who's making these notes has the right to be wrong about it. It has the right to be like, this is an idea that's still in its infancy and I need to, like, grow it. I have a right to be wrong, especially if we're going into like timeless, like where like the time context isn't as important. Like, it's important for people to realize that between the times someone posted something and between now, their feelings may have changed, but they might not have.

And that's still okay. We need to give people safe, and I hate the like safe space language, but like, you know, places where it's okay. to explore ideas and you know how people- God forbid you be wrong on the internet, you know. God forbid you be wrong on the internet, right? And so that's another reason why I like them. But also digital gardens aren't staying with the trouble because they're trying to erase the internet because of how blogs are and trying to go back to before blogs instead

of being like, okay, how do we stay with blogs and go forward? Yeah. How do we make these things coexist without being on a spectrum? Yeah, like I got a little cheeky in my paper and it was like, we can't go back to the digital garden of Eden guys or something. I was like, ha, ha, get it, because I'm an asshole. Was there Mordaun and Haraway you wanted me to bring up and completely mangled because I'm terrible at explaining things? No, I was just reading through looking through the paper and trying to, you know, get a better sense because I'm not familiar with Haraway. so.

Yeah, I tried to read the sideboard manifesto a while ago, but I didn't really get it. I didn't really know how to approach it, so I gave up. Yeah, I think people's problem with hairways, they take her two literally. And sort of for understanding her and then as a way of approaching the digital garden space, is that two of her big things are making kin slash assemblages, where it's like you take two things that might be contradictory. and instead of resolving those contradictions, you go, okay, well, what happens if we put these two things together? Human machine, human animal, man, woman, that kind of thing.

And then also, like, the same way that Judith Butler talks about gender as performance, we're not as a, like, do drag, but how gender is reinforced through us doing gender. Donna Harway has that same mindset, but with like science and fact and reality, and she calls it storytelling. Like science and the way we view science and interact with fact and truth and science is reinforced through the way that we do it. And she likes to use storytelling as a way to talk about that. Like one of my favorite lines in staying with the trouble is it matters what stories tell stories. it matters what thoughts, think thoughts, like stuff like that. And so that the way that we reinforce things by doing them in a certain way that like science, like yeah, there are things that are facts, but like science is stories that we tell to explain things.

And through that storytelling, we reinforce certain ways of seeing something. So I try to, because I have the same problem too. I'm like, wait, why is she bringing Cthulu into this? Why is she talking about spiders? What's going on? Why I was now talking about Medusa in this weird eco-feminism book. But she's just very metaphorical. So I try to like step out of whatever she's talking about.

I mean like, okay, how is she talking about this? And what does that mean? Yeah. And while I was reading through all of this, I was kind of thinking about like how to apply this to like sort of a library environment. Because I've noticed three different discussions and stuff I've had that like that seems to be the crux of a lot of librarians. like problems, like why they don't feel like they're making progress is because they don't have the sort of environment where you can create that context, you know, like with academic librarians,

sometimes you're just doing like a one-off or you don't get to go back to the same classrooms. So like how do we build a digital garden in a library space? Like not an actual like digital garden like what we're talking about with the wikis and stuff, but like sort of metaphorical or metaphysical digital garden. out of a library and the community that surrounds it. So, yeah, or even like, especially with, like, cataloging discourse about, like, library of Congress subject headings, I believe sort of like the staying with the trouble ideas that Donna Harroway talks about are very in line with, like, what Emily Drabinski

talks about. Shout out, Emily Dravinsky, if you are involved in ALA at all, vote for her. I'm not an ALA anymore, but go vote for Emily to be president of ALA, I guess. but her article, Queering the Catalogue, The Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction. And there's another one, and I can't remember the author at the top of my head, but it's called Do We DeRacialize? And it talks about similar concepts of what do we do about these subject headings in Library of Congress or what do we do racialize? It's the Dewey Decimal Classification terms. Do we just fix them and correct them?

And then what does that do? Does that force us to be accountable for how we have described something in the past? Is that actually change how we're thinking about something? Or is it just hiding our mistakes? And I know in Amelie's article, she talks about how, instead of like forcing this responsibility in under catalogers, she's like, hey, reference librarians, maybe we should be the ones who are engaging with these and engaging with patrons about them. So I believe like that sort of mindset of instead of just fully getting rid of something

and correcting it, when language is always, always already, I'm where my dare to a shirt today, I'm like always already going to be incorrect and deferring meaning and all of this stuff. Instead of just erasing that and not engaging with it, like actually engaging with it, you're staying with that trouble, which sometimes is hard when you're a cataloging person who like works on the homoaurus and is trying to make things better. But exactly. Like I feel like a lot of these concepts are very relevant to conversations that we're having in librarianship about, well, how do we make this better? How do we make this more equitable?

How do we do this in a anti-racist way? I have issues with the framework of let's decolonize this because most of the time that just means get rid of the thing and then people aren't meaning it that way. But, you know, how do we make this better, basically? And instead of exterminating it and annihilating what came before, like how do we live with the trouble that we've caused? work with it, I guess. Yeah, and I mean, a big problem with that is just realizing that libraries are

capitalist institutions. And actually, I was talking with someone who might come on the podcast to talk about how public goods can sort of reinforce capitalist ideology. So get into that more. But I think I don't remember who wrote it. Maybe it was Hall. Modern Capitalist Academic Library was a big part of the book. I think it was called the Dialectic of Academic Librarianship. It's been a while since I've read it. It's a few years ago. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's no really just a clever way of getting out of it. I think eco-feminism is like a much, eco-socialism isn't, it's a much bigger discussion than what's going on in the libraries. On an ending note, if anybody has, if there are librarians out there or library-related people

out there who have digital gardens, I would love to see them. I think that would be fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, Jay, show me yours. Yeah, it's, um, one. Wild at Heart. Garden, except Wilds, but like Oscar Wild, and there's hyphens between Wild at Heart, and then dot garden is the like domain. So your Twitter handle. It's my Twitter handle, but without the underscore and with hyphens. It's actually linked on my Twitter.

So like, go look at it. I need to do some upkeep on it. I need a tin to my garden. Wink. Yeah, I'll put it in the notes. I've got some other stuff. Zettelcastin, and I found some other things that we brought up. So yeah, you know, people are getting back into like commonplace books.

And that's also a very similar idea. I went to a presentation recently about using commonplace books in pedagogy as like a way for students to do reflections on what they have read and stuff in a safe private place. So I don't remember when I where I saw that. I think it was at like a digital humanities conference or something that I know that they're starting to come back. And people are using like air table and one note. and stuff for them. For commonplace books? Yeah, where you're not making them public, where they're more private.

So commonplace books are a very medieval concept where you kind of like, again, throw recipes in there or conversion tables or quotes you like or thoughts you've had about something. And they're more like private. But a lot of people are like connecting that and like as a part of the lineage to like digital gardens and stuff. Cool. I use their table for work.

but I haven't thought of using it for like creative stuff. We just use it for automating tons of data that we have to collect. Yeah, I feel like the way I see people use it or commonplace books is like the way that you would use OneNote where you have all these different like tabs for different things and stuff. I don't know, people just really love spreadsheets and I hate them. So I think it wraps it up. Yeah, go have fun with the way you do note-taking

and rethinking the way you interact with information. Yeah, good night. Thank you.