(14-08-2020, 12:25 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Part of the problem is the absence of a handy up-to-date reference which would be not descriptive (like e.g. Rene's website), but assertive
The Yale photo-facsimile published in 2016 should nicely fill that role. It is of course quite short. However, coming from Yale it is clearly authoritative.
The lax response from the "Voynich community" for me highlighted one of the main problems with this community.
It cannot be fully up to date since it is a printed book.
(14-08-2020, 12:40 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What surprised me was that the level of agreement was much lower than I expected.
Yeah, that was basically the problem with this idea. Well, to be more precise, it allowed someone who was not qualified to judge a statement to still block it. And by "qualified" I don't mean having a relevant degree, but at least having studied the aspect in question enough to be able to have an informed discussion about it.
(14-08-2020, 12:40 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What surprised me was that the level of agreement was much lower than I expected.
That was anticipated, and that's in fact the good thing, because it filters through only stone-and-concrete statements with which almosty everyone agrees. And if a researcher is not familiar with results expressed in such statements, s/he would better take time to study them before proceeding to his/her own developments.
No, the problem definitely was not the low level of consensus, I must plainly confess that I just was too lazy to carry this activity forth, and that's the main reason.
The #1 problem, in my opinion, is that there is no generally accepted way of working on the Voynich without an overriding theory sat on your shoulder.
Whether you think it is a cipher / obscure language / distorted language / private language / hoax / shorthand / steganographic experiment / whatever, please try to find ways of putting that aside - not only is it not helping, it is becoming more and more of a problem the more time goes by.
There are so many basic questions about curious behaviour that are unanswered (I listed a few here a couple of days ago) that it is almost pointless to try to build up a complete answer that bypasses the basic stuff.
@-JKP-, @ReneZ, and @Alin_J, you guys have much more experience in the world of academe than I do, so I'll take your word for it. I naively believed that an author putting a reference in a bibliography means that the author has read it and understands it, because that's the way I always did it when I was a student. I would feel ashamed citing a primary source I never (or barely) even read. It's one thing to cite a verbatim quote, or a single unconnected fact, with a source that you only used to cite that one thing. It's another thing entirely to list a book as a primary source of information for your work, when in reality you only used it to cherry-pick a few tidbits pertinent to your argument, and have no understanding of the greater thrust of the book.
If the stories of corruption and bribery rampant in academe are anywhere near true, I'd argue that the output of informal and unregulated research scenes like this one have a certain unrefined honesty to them that's much rarer in formal venues.
The hard fact is, wholly unbiased and objective scholarship is a rarity. Every person and organization involved in research has irrational hopes for how the research will go, and what it will show. My sense is that people involved with academe have been socialized to be extremely discreet about these biases and hopes, often to the point of keeping them entirely to oneself. Amateur and informal researchers with little formal tertiary schooling are more likely to commit the social error of wearing these biases and hopes on their sleeve. This sort of candor comes across as uncouth to academics, because bias is not conducive to getting the facts straight. And they're right. But this doesn't mean that academics truly are free of bias and ulterior motives. They just try to keep these things to a minimum, and save face for themselves professionally by not talking about their own slip-ups.
Just to lay my cards on the table, I find this book sums up my (cynical) view of the relationship between the knowledge-based professions, and the moneyed interests of the industries that fund — and therefore design — the training for these professions: You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. I think this book should be required reading for anyone even considering graduate or professional school, especially someone with stars in their eyes looking forward to all the free inquiry and autonomy promised them, like I once was.
Then again, I'm biased by my experience.
(14-08-2020, 05:19 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I naively believed that an author putting a reference in a bibliography means that the author has read it and understands it, because that's the way I always did it when I was a student. I would feel ashamed citing a primary source I never (or barely) even read.
I don't think that there are any hard rules. For young academics it may seem interesting to have a long bibliography, to show that they are familiar with all relevant sources. For specific types of publications, a long bibliography may also be extremely useful.
I don't think that there is anything wrong with just citing a publication in order to provide the original source for some information, regardless whether the author has read the paper or not. Usually, he would have.
The idea behind cited publications is always to help the reader, or provide some traceability.
Curse's bibliography is online here, because I couldn't justify an extra 16 pages of print-on-demand: You are not allowed to view links.
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