Welcome to the Gray Area

A digital garden home for grayinfilm for curious minds alike. Powered by Obsidian and the Obsidian Digital Garden Plugin.

On Digital Gardening

According to an article by Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Nestlabs, "A digital garden is an online space at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public." ^[1] The concept of the garden being "evergreen", i.e. never decaying due to the continuous updates and improvements from the author, its "gardener".

But why build a digital garden?

I was interested in the concept of learning in public, which is why I initially started publishing tech blogs and made an archive of things I learned through Readwise. However, as life caught up and I abandoned all those projects, I wanted to be more intentional with my learning and share it to the public as well.

Humans are interesting, but what is more interesting to me is learning about the method to the madness. What makes us tick? Why are we so obsessed with our phones right now? And what is up with the tiktok-ification of apps?

There are so many questions that go unexplored, and to a curious mind, they're all interesting. I try my best to document my learnings here so as to keep an evergreen garden of interconnected learnings.

How to Navigate

• The left sidebar shows the pages in my digital garden. They're divided into several categories:
  • 01 - Articles
  • 02 - Books
  • 03 - Papers
  • 04 - Resources
  • Uncategorized
• Each category represents the source material and each entry is tagged with the specific category it is aligned with
• The right sidebar shows links to connected articles or related ideas
• As always, please remember that this is a continuous work in progress. There's always something changing and our definition-of-done could never really be met, as there is never an ending to learning.

Resources

Here are some resources that I found helpful while making this digital garden:

• Readwise - I used this app for highlighting, annotating and saving articles that I came across in the day as an effective read-it-later and annotating app.
• Glasp - a free alternative to Readwise that I came across when it was just launched and I was just starting to learn about digital gardening. Take a look at my Glasp here.
• Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton - one of the most cohesive examples about digital garden compilations
• The Zettelkasten and Digital Garden tags on Github provides different types of zettelkasten tools that I pored through while thinking of how to make my digital garden. In the end, I decided to go with Obsidian.

You can find more specific resources for digital gardens in the Digital Garden Resources page.

Additionally, you can look at the Obsidian Community Vault for inspiration