Knowledge Garden

A knowledge garden is a collection of interconnected notes.

Knowledge is not inherently linear, so it should not be presented in a linear fashion (take this course, read this book, then that article, etc). A knowledge garden where each page is relatively short enables the reader to jump around and progress non-linearly.

The idea of building a personal knowledge garden came from my experience of doing research. Live discussion is a key part of research, but one cannot be constantly talking to people (one needs quality time to think!), so I wanted to build something that can ‘talk to’ people in my stead.

How about a folder containing all my notes? Better than nothing, but this approach falls short of providing an interactive experience. Notes in folders are isolated, so the reader will probably still need me to point them to relevant notes. A folder won’t work by itself.

By contrast, in a knowledge garden pages are connected by links and organized by tags, and there is also the full-text search functionality. By clicking around, the visitor can talk to this digital copy of my academic self.