The Voynich Ninja

Earlier historians didn't have the Internet.

I'm quite impressed by how much information the intelligence community's Study Group was able to gather about the VMS, especially considering that many places were closed during wartime, travel was greatly restricted, and many treasures (like manuscripts) were hidden away until things settled down.

But the Internet isn't a panacea either. I see bad information and outright wrong information every day (especially on those question and answer sites where the first five people who answer almost never know what they are talking about and then they lock the threads before someone knowledgable answers).


The following is a very trivial example, but here's the kind of thing I see very frequently on the Web (from Merriam-Webster's dictionary):
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[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]Definition of [i]paleography[/i]

1: the study of ancient or antiquated writings and inscriptions : the deciphering and interpretation of historical writing systems and manuscripts

2a: an ancient or antiquated manner of writing
b: ancient or antiquated writings[/font]

[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]First Known Use of [i]paleography[/i]

1749, in the meaning defined at sense 2a        <-------[/font]
[font=Lato, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif]------------------------------[/font]

• I knew the date of 1749 for the etymology was wrong as soon as I saw it. I have seen earlier references and the ones I've seen probably aren't even the earliest since I haven't actually studied the etymology of the word. For example, in A New Voyage to Italy (1714), Maximilien Misson mentions Greek palaeography, possibly inspired by Montfaucon's use of palaeographia several years earlier. There are probably many others.
  
• A less trivial example is a wrong translation of a short line of text that was included in an academic paper. Within months it had spread to hundreds of sites on the Web without a single person questioning whether the translation was correct. They simply parroted something that was convenient to copy.
  
• And then, of course, there are the supposedly peer-reviewed VMS papers that should never have been accepted for publication, and all the VMS "solutions" that get so much airtime in the popular press.
  

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]-------[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]In other words, you can't trust anything you see, even from well-known sources, and have to double-check everything.[/font]
[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]
Often I spend more time trying to verify things than I do on research (which can be disheartening at times and is probably why I'm writing this instead of eating my lunch). In fact, this is the main reason my blogs sit for months (sometimes years) before I post them. The one I tried to finish last night lacks a citation and I can't find the original source. It has vanished off the Web—drowned out by thousands of posts on the copycat sites. My searches are starting to look like this:[/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]searchterm -twitter -pinterest -123rf -shutterstock -alamy -depositphotos -pixabay -canstockphoto -pixels.com (and so on...)[/font]

I don't usually screen out Getty images because they have some good historical information. Sometimes if I can't find what I want I'll include Pinterest, but mostly I'll exclude it. Sometimes I exclude flickr, sometimes not. It depends.



My only real strategy so far is to exclude the Websites that are the worst offenders (like Twitter, Pinterest and the stock-photo sites), but I've noticed that original sources tend to age off (one of my favorite botanical sites doesn't show up any more and I know they are still out there) and this happens faster now that the copycat (re-posting sites) are getting so big. I can't bookmark every site... I already have more bookmarks than I can manage (thousands). And there's no way to bookmark a source you haven't found yet.

[font=sans-serif]So, if anyone has any tips as to how to get past all the copycat sites that are increasingly cluttering the Web with replicated information that doesn't include sources, I would be happy to hear them. I spend most of my time on repositories with digitized manuscripts, but sometimes I need to actually FIND stuff on the Web and I don't want the re-copied stuff, I want the original sources.
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(22-04-2020, 11:05 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.if anyone has any tips

I take it you know about Wayback Machine?
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Your original site could have been archived...

Don, that's a good idea. Thank you. I will look for it (and others) there.

I did know about WayBack, but the Web is so vast, I sometimes forget about individual sites and it had completely slipped my mind.

(22-04-2020, 11:05 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm quite impressed by how much information the intelligence community's Study Group was able to gather about the VMS, especially considering that many places were closed during wartime, travel was greatly restricted, and many treasures (like manuscripts) were hidden away until things settled down.

What was (largely) the same then and now is that the people who knew their business also knew each other. They communicated and exchanged information, but of course at a much slower rate than is possible now.

What could not exist in the pre-internet days is networks of amateurs that would study a topic outside their area of expertise.

The knowledge about the Voynich MS in the times of Friedman was still very superficial.
D'Imperio in the 1970's seems to have been the first to study the 'history of the history'. At this time, the century in which the MS was produced was still much debated, and no new information on top of Voynich's 1921 paper had been found. The little bits of useful information that were produced before 1960 came from people like Panofsky and Salomon, exactly the type of people I meant in my first paragraph above.

Other people from that group were (with hindsight) unfortunately quite wrong.

One of the most interesting (in this respect) pamphlets in my little collection is a Spanish treatise on a 16th century diplomatic cipher, published in the mid 1950's by a couple of Spanish intelligence agents.
Now, it is interesting not for what they discovered (bugger all, frankly) but because of the way the whole thing is phrased.
The boys claimed to have cracked it in "a couple of hours". The whole thing is nonsense, but of course crack intelligence agents in the time of Franco (the fascist dictator) weren't going to get anywhere if they didn't pretend to be top notch.
So this whole thing is actually about them, in a very big way, and not what they had "discovered". But it is constantly cited in later studies, and I have come across references to it in scholarly articles written decades later.