SPECIFIC ATLAS — A Nostr Atlas of Donald Judd

An interactive atlas of the American artist Donald Judd (1928–1994) — his life, work, geographies, and ideas — built as a real Nostr application. Every node in the graph (a person, work, place, idea, institution, or moment) is a signed, addressable Nostr event broadcast to public relays. The app writes art history to a decentralized network and reads it back over the same protocol.

"A work needs only to be interesting." — Donald Judd

What it does

• Linked-graph navigation. A force-directed constellation of ~40 nodes centered on Judd. Click any node to read it and follow its edges; the graph is the spine.
• Navigate three dimensions:
  • Time — a dual-handle range and a “Sweep the life” animation that reveals the biography chronologically (1928 → present).
  • Geography — a Geography lens re-anchors every geolocated node to its real latitude/longitude (Excelsior Springs → New York → Marfa → Korea), so the edges literally cross real distance. A projected map layout via d3.geoMercator.
  • Concepts — toggle node kinds (People, Works, Places, Ideas, Institutions, Moments) on and off; search across titles, places, and text.
• Detail panel with each node's text, dates, place, its inbound/outbound edges, and full Nostr provenance: kind, d-tag, author npub, event id, and a link to inspect the live event on njump.me.
• Propose a node — contributors sign proposals with their own Nostr identity. Archivist keys approve or reject those proposals before they join the atlas.

The Nostr design

• Kind 31987 — an addressable event (NIP-01 parameterized-replaceable range 30000–39999). Each node is identified by its d-tag (the node id), so re-seeding is idempotent: the same node always replaces itself rather than duplicating.
• Edges live on the source node as ["edge", targetId, relation] tags. Time, place, and coordinates are tags too (start, end, lat, lon, place, t).
• Archive identity — the app contains only the archive public key. The archive private key is never shipped to browsers and should be rotated if it was ever exposed.
  • npub: npub1wm4ez7ludz9cfatn84gxrnmsaxjf9kz04xrysmelqyulgzv7ws4skl6f8m
• Proposal workflow — contributor-signed kind 31988 events are queued for review. Archivist-signed kind 31989 approval/rejection events form a configurable threshold gate. Accepted proposals remain attributed to the contributor. Configure archivist public keys as npubs in ARCHIVIST_NPUBS; do not use a key whose secret has ever been exposed.
• Lifecycle on load: connect to relays → read existing archive events → read proposals and moderation votes → subscribe live. If relays are unreachable, the atlas still runs fully from local data.
• Relays: relay.damus.io, nos.lol, relay.nostr.band, relay.primal.net, nostr.mom.

Run it

It's a static site (no build step). Any static server works:

npm start              # python3 -m http.server 8011
# then open http://localhost:8011

Dependencies load from CDNs at runtime: d3 v7 (graph + projection) and nostr-tools v2 (keys, signing, relays). An internet connection is needed for the Nostr layer and the CDNs.

Key safety

Do not commit an nsec, hex secret key, .env with secrets, or any private-key material. Archivist and archive keys are configured by npubs only in src/nostr.js. Generate or choose archivist identities outside this repo, keep their private keys offline or in a trusted Nostr signer, and commit only their npubs. Generated in-browser identities are shown once and kept in memory for the session; they are not persisted by the app.

Files

index.html      shell + layout
styles.css      industrial / editorial theme
src/data.js     the curated atlas (nodes + edges) — the content
src/nostr.js    keys, addressable event build/sign, relay pool (SimplePool)
src/graph.js    d3 force + geographic renderer, selection/filter/zoom
src/app.js      orchestration: facets, search, panel, Nostr lifecycle, add-node

A note on the history

Facts were checked against the Judd Foundation and Chinati chronologies and other public sources. A few specifics worth flagging: Judd first leased buildings in Marfa in 1971 and moved there permanently in 1977; his daughter Rainer Judd (b. 1970) is named for the dancer Yvonne Rainer, his son Flavin (b. 1968) for Dan Flavin. The Chinati Foundation was founded in 1986 on the former Fort D.A. Russell. The atlas is curated and interpretive — corrections are welcome; propose a node.