Gardens as networks of private insight

Andy’s site, referred to as “working notes”, construct a “thinking environment” that Andy uses to generate his own content About these notes. He does encorporate external resources, but these are secondary to his own writing and typically consist of links rather than unique objects. Subjects are explores in sections, marked with a ‘§’.

The way Andy organizes these into collections is by section (or MOC). The relationships become a network, not by accidental inclusion into the same tag group, but by deliberate referencing and backreferencing. If you wish to see a collection, you must find the overarching MOC, or MOCs, of which that content is a part. Navigation-wise, this is by clicking links, but a network diagram could be generated and spokes identified.

Andy’s site, in contrast to gardens as museums of others content, informs the reader equally about his favorite subjects and about the mind of Andy himself.

Reflection

My site’s purpose is more closely aligned with this approach because I favor content creation over collection. The limitation to this approach, however, is that it limits the context of my writing to the direct source I ascribe any one idea (or multiple if I pull together the various quotes). For example, I may have a business note which references Maxwell’s leadership book. If I wanted to further explore the context of my insight, re-reading the book is my option. However, if that book is included in a collection of leadership books, then I could further develop the insight by perusing any of the leadership books in the collection, even books which I might not have considered relevant to the note’s topic.