About Angie Bowen

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The year is 1999, and I'm happily clicking away on a behemoth of a beige box desktop computer. I'm carefully linking HTML pages together, forming a complex and intricate choose-your-own-adventure story. Click here to go deeper into the woods. Click here to rest in the abandoned cabin. Each choice leads to another branching path through my narrative hypertext labyrinth.

I didn't know it then, but I was creating the first vestiges of what would become my life's work more than two decades later (more on that in a minute).

Back then, the web was an experimental wild west. Website aesthetics were limited only to their creator's imagination. We had dancing gifs and psychedelic light shows. We had hot pink text on a yellow background that burned your eyes out of your head. And we had iframes, nested in tables meant for text, that we slotted sliced up images around to create a dollhouse for our pixel art. Yes, that last one was also me.

But then everything changed. It started with the homogenized aesthetic of chronological blogs. Then social media stole any originality that remained and bound our attention to the mighty algorithm.

Many of us would love to get back to our hypertext roots. And that's exactly what digital gardens allow us to do.

What is a Digital Garden?

Hypertextualization was an exciting aspect of the early web. Media had been mostly linear until this point (magazines, newspapers, television). Depending on your age, you may take it for granted, but hypertext allowed us to create non-linear narratives through the linking of ideas. If you ever lose hours falling down Wikipedia rabbit holes, that may help you understand why hypertext was such an exciting prospect.

A digital garden is a type of personal wiki where you share your knowledge, hobbies, passions, curiosities in a connected web of personal experience.

When I stumbled across the concept of digital gardens in 2020, I was immediately taken back to joy I used to feel in those early days creating websites. So I decided to start building one as a pandemic project, something fun to pass the time.

40+ years of writing and nothing to show for it

The first story I remember writing was about how turkeys don't like Thanksgiving for an assignment in school. It was written on those horizontal papers with 3 colored lines.

I was 5 years old and not clever enough say they have nothing to be thankful for, but still pretty forward thinking for a kindergardener. A bit of important context; I was raised on a farm, so I was just writing about what I saw. I wasn't a 5 year old reading The Sexual Politics of Meat or anything.

I wrote in notebooks my whole life, and never kept a single one. I created my first website in the late 90s and have been writing and creating online ever since. I lost those backups a few years ago when the hard drive died. The point is, I've never been careful about saving my work.

I see people like Gwern and Cory Doctorow who have been documenting their knowledge online for 30 years and I kick myself for saving nothing over the decades. PKM changed that for me, but I've only known about it for 2 years, and I'm 48 years old.

I would give anything to have it all back but all I can do is move forward and begin documenting again.

To that end, my target audience is now me. I wrote for others for so many years, I'm still trying to get rid of the last vestiges of marketing that creeps into my voice. Now I want to write for myself, for my own curiosity and understanding.

I've been cultivating a private mind garden since I came across Maggie Appleton's article on digital gardens. I figured it was time I created my own public garden.