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Other People's Tiddlywiki Tutorials:

Video tutorial that I used to start my Tiddlywiki by Frances Meetze

Food for Thought about Digital Gardens:

Video by Youtuber Wesley Anna titled "how i digital garden in capacities & why it changed how i use the internet"

Here is my structure note that serves as an index of keywords:

As you can see, the body of the note when viewed normally consists of a table of contents. Each term can be expanded using the carrot to see notes that use that term as a keyword. Some of those notes are themselves expandable, as in the example here, where the keyword "Fountains" contains one note about fountains as well as another structure note that is a compilation of notes about paintings of fountains.

In edit mode, however, you can see that this table of contents is produced using the selective-expandable div. In other words, rather than having to manually set up this table of contents, this piece of code does it for me. All I have to do is add keywords to notes—which I'm doing anyway!

The note titled "Fountains" uses the keyword "Index of Keywords" while the note titled "Paintings of Fountains" uses the keyword "Fountains." Lastly, each note about a painting of a fountain uses the keyword "Paintings of Fountains." Thus forms the nested, selective-expandable list!

✶ Zettels (aka "Tiddlers")

"Zettel" is German for "paper slip" and this is how I refer to my notes; notes in Tiddlywiki are also affectionately called "tiddlers." All of my zettels are tagged with a 10-character unique ID comprised of the date followed by a period and the time in military notation: YYMMDD.TTTT

All zettels on principal should have at least one inbound link (even if that is just through being filed under a collection note or source note) and at least one outbound link (even if it is just a keyword tag).

This said, links should not be made arbitrarily. All notes–even those without a source, keyword tags, or inline note-hyperlinks–can be resurfaced through the search function. Thus connections should only be made authentically and organically, and not just for the sake of having links.

✶ Structure Notes

If a zettel has no unique date-time ID, that means it is a structure note. I use a few different kinds of structure notes:

Collection Notes: These notes collect useful entry points into a broad topic or theme, or describe and map useful relationships between a group of notes that have to do with a particular project or topic of interest.

Keyword Note: This note compiles selective-expandable lists of all keyword tags.

Source Notes: These are notes containing information about a reference. The body of the note is simply the source information. Links to source notes may appear as a tag on a zettel &/or within the body of the zettel as a citation.

I treat my own physical journals just like any other source. Any note that contains thinking developed in my journals will include that journal as a source. This allows for my Journals hub note to provide a second way to view and sort notes (by the original timeline in which I was engaging with sources and developing ideas). My own published works may also be referenced as sources.

If you keep a journal, perhaps you've noticed (as I have) that your journal is not only a rendering of your attitudes, ideas, and feelings; that there is a reciprocity, a feedback loop where the way you habitually use your notebook guides what you notice, how you feel, and how you inhabit your days.

I have been journaling for fifteen years; I am 27 now and began keeping a diary at the age of 12. In the beginning, I would make my journals myself by deconstructing spiral-bound one-subject notebooks and creating construction-paper covers and stapling it all together (basically the same thing I am doing now, except with much fancier paper!). I used these handmade booklets until I got my first laptop at 15. That night, I wondered what would happen if I journaled on my computer instead—and for the next five years, that's what I did.

Those digital journals are hard to read. They were written during the end of high school and the beginning of college—a chaotic and confusing time in my life and a period when I was pretty mentally unwell and struggling to get the help I needed. But it's not just that fact that makes the journals difficult to look back on. It's also because of what the format of journaling digitally allowed me to do.

Back then it was not unusual for me to sit typing in my bed for hours, essentially having an emotional breakdown on paper. There was no friction, nothing to intervene and slow the runaway train of my thoughts. I would often get up in the middle of class, dinner, a party, go outside or to the bathroom and type furiously into my phone, desperately trying to relieve the pressure of words in my head. We hear so much about journaling as a tool we can use to care for our mental health, but for me it felt like the opposite: like a compulsion that amplified my anxiety and was actively making my mental health worse.

In the years since then, my wish to transform my journal has been completely coextensive with my wish to get better. And part of that process has been accepting that not everything needs to be put into words. I have been learning that I do not need to convert every experience, impression, and feeling into a sentence. I am learning to let things take more nebulous forms.

Another way to put this is that I am learning to ask questions that only art can answer.

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I often say that I want my journal to feel more like a creative workbook than a diary; I want it to be a place for my creative practice to unfold, a tool I use to engage more thoughtfully with art and connect more attentively to the world around me.

It's like in Ozu films, how he will insert shots that are basically just still-lifes, like a vase in the alcove, in the middle of an emotional scene. There’s not necessarily any symbolism, nothing illustrative about the vase—but it’s also more than mere scene-setting. It’s a way of keeping the human narrative, it’s temporality, in balance. That’s how I think of the photographs and commonplacing content that I include in the pages of my journal. It’s more than just memory-keeping or study. It’s really a matter of composition, of keeping my own inner story in proportion and in context.

[Still from Late Spring directed by Yasujiro Ozu]

If I’m walking down the street and I’m absorbed completely in my thoughts, and I’m not noticing what’s around me, I see that as an analogue for one way I could write in my journal. To simply take a picture of the flowerpot that my neighbor has on their stoop that I thought was beautiful and print that out in my notebook—that is an act of saying, I don’t have to imprison myself in my own inner world. I am part of the world and when I notice things around me, and let those things become pillars around which my thoughts can flow, then I am okay. I’m not trapped inside my head. There are windows and doors in and out.

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But old habits die hard. I still sometimes feel like all I do is write things down because nothing feels real until I put it into words. At times, I reach this sad, horrible point where I become almost averse to interesting things, because my mind is already so saturated with thoughts that I just can't take any more input. What this amounts to is that I don’t know how to trust my mind and memory to keep anything safe. I don’t trust my mind to be able to make distinctions between what is important and what is trivial.

I've felt this way for more or less my whole life, but now I think the internet and social media are increasingly generalizing this experience of information-overload for everyone. This is the cost of brain rot: it erodes the trust we have in our own minds.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the Zettelkasten method and various people’s approaches to Personal Knowledge Management as I’ve returned to building out a digital garden using Tiddlywiki. There’s a theme you see over and over when people talk about digital gardening: the idea of a structure that promotes serendipity. When you start, your impulse is probably to create a structure for yourself to work within. You might want to create a list of categories or topics or keywords around things you’re interested in and that you expect to be gathering notes about. But everyone who has a robust digital garden seems to say that this is going to impede the long-term success of this kind of note-taking practice. Niklas Luhmann, who had a famous paper Zettelkasten system comprised of nearly 100,000 notes on slips of paper, talked about “communicating” with his Zettelkasten. His Zettelkasten was like another person in that it could surprise him; he couldn’t always predict what it might return in response to a query.

Eventually a Zettelkasten gets to a point where there are so many notes, and so many relations and connections between those notes, that you can forget you made them and can thus encounter them in new contexts. That’s how you get surprise, serendipity, unexpected connections, and ultimately new knowledge.

[Commonplacing in my binder (left); my Index of Keywords in my digital garden (right)]

It blew my mind when I realized that the best advice is to stop trying to map every connection and sort everything. One should let topic clusters arise rather than predetermining them, because this literally limits what one is capable of noticing and saying. It’s not that the digital garden has no structure—it’s that you have to let the structure emerge on its own over time.

I’ve often felt like the only way to address the wealth of information available to me is to become a martyr to processing, interpreting, sifting through it all—to vanquish and quiet the chaos in my head through brute-force organization, compartmentalization, discipline.

But I'm realizing that, not only is this doomed to fail, leaving me depressed and exhausted, there’s actually something valuable about leaving things uninterpreted and disorganized—or, about sublimating them, letting them germinate, dissolve, vanish into the depths, and perhaps resurface at some future moment unrecognizable and transformed.

What I’m learning is that in my journaling practice, whether that’s in a digital tool or in my notebook, my goal shouldn’t necessarily be to understand everything, but to learn to live with what is beyond the grasp of the operations of my mind. To leave the vase on the shelf without turning into a symbol, without forcing upon it some meaning—just to notice it, and to be in the room with it while my story unfolds. ✦

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Sources I referenced or drew from in this post:

Wesley Anna, "how i digital garden in capacities and why it changed how i use the internet," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgeqRXoB3c8

"Create a Zettelkasten for your Notes to Improve Thinking and Writing," https://zettelkasten.de/posts/zettelkasten-improves-thinking-writing/