The Voynich Ninja

(30-01-2025, 06:11 AM)Gioynich Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(30-01-2025, 03:44 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.....

In a perhaps less chaotic summary, I think it might be helpful to do the opposite exercise of the one we did in this thread: which features (one, max 2 per sign) most reliably link the VM figures to a tradition for the figure? And where are those types found together? Which are the odd ones out?

I think this is very similar to what Marco once published on Stephen Bax' site. But perhaps it can be refined and expanded upon.

You might want to look at this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

As Gioynich said in the thread he linked, these quantitative approaches are still based on “a lot of subjectivity”. Only selecting a few features is still subjective: including or excluding a single feature (when there only are a few) can easily affect which the top 5 matches are. One can probably find a way to encode a distance function that weights features on some objective basis, trying to make less subjective what Gioynich did:

Gioynich Wrote:I subjectively gave more weight to some characteristics and gave more weight to characteristics that are rare across the whole dataset (e.g. virgo being a woman is pretty common, so it's assigned less weight).

E.g. one could have weights that are inversely proportional to the frequency of a feature. This means that a zodiac which has N weird features in common with the Voynich ms will score higher than a zodiac which shares N common features.
In general, I think that the higher the number of features that are accurately examined the more reliable the final score.

Anyway, I am now less confident of quantitative approaches than I was when I tackled the subject on the site of Stephen Bax. Gioynich’s research pointed out the Berlin Copy of Laufenberg that includes “old age with rosary”, but that was not enough for any of us to carefully examine the manuscript and notice the image that Koen discovered in the more complete Karlsruhe copy. Whatever output we get from a zodiac comparison, it will still just be the result of some code or spreadsheet that somebody put together and it will be unlikely to lead to a wider consensus. I think that we are now in a position where, without help from trained art historians, it’s very difficult to make progress, unless the Voynich zodiac was copied from a single source (which I personally doubt) and we happen to find it.

To me, the most unique thing about the zodiac is women in buckets clutching stars. I mean, what the heck?  I can guess at meaning within my general theory to make these details fit but I honestly don’t think we’ll find a template; this appears to be a unique design choice. Now that the location seems to be narrowing down, perhaps Koen, Marco, et al will find something that even thematically would explain them.

Yeah, that's why the thread is called "Zodiac signs", just focusing on the central figures. Those look like they are taken from a more traditional source and still bear its characteristics. But the act of incorporating these examples into whatever the VM Zodiac section is, seems to have led to a number of unique situations.

I think if I were looking for an artistic template for the women I wouldn’t rule out material culture aside from manuscripts. These “processionals” decorate a lot of urns, vases, plates,church windows and ceilings. That’s another reason why your.work on the Karlsruhis so important. If locality can be narrowed down a tour of local museums and long-standing churches might be fruitful. And it would be rather fun even if not!