The atlas phase: research axes, personas, and honest surfaces
20 July 2026 · Nabu news
Phase 35 makes the library’s shape visible. Eighty sources now carry
research-axis tags — eighteen desks from the Classicist to the
Japanologist, each with its persona — and nabu list --axis,
status --axis, and nabu sync celtic work the desks directly. Axes
are tags, not folders: a source serves every desk it belongs to, and
the public atlas page (docs/axes.md)
is pinned to the live registry by a drift test, so it can never
quietly go stale.
The phase’s second half is less visible and will matter longer. Every numeric limit and hand-enumerated list in query code is a census claim about the corpus at the moment it was written, and three ingestion sprints had silently falsified several — a search page could come back “no matches” while matches existed beyond a window sized for a corpus a quarter the size. Phase 35 inventoried every such site, re-measured each against the live catalog, and converted the class into standing gates: truncating surfaces must announce what they hid, empty results under filters must explain themselves, and every era-bound constant now carries its census and date, machine-checked at every commit.
The nomenclature also settled: “axis” now always means a research axis; the date-and-place dimension is the timeline. East-Asian-width- aware rendering landed alongside — the first fix from the newly CJK-heavy shelves, aligning every concordance column through Han text. Numbers as of 2026-07-20; the corpus stood at 24.4 million passages at the phase gate.