The Voynich Ninja

All,
I would like to announce the Beta-launch of a new crowd-based research online application dedicated to into the numerous plant illustrations in the Voynich Manuscript.
This web application is called "The Voynich Garden" and you can find it at: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The site is in beta mode, but as we formally release it, we will carry over any data you enter in the meantime.

I would suggest reading through the application's About page (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) since it describes --after first giving basic background about the Voynich Manuscript itself-- the application, its purpose, and some of its unique features.

We are still performing QA testing, so please excuse any remaining bugs. In fact,  please let us know if you do encounter any issues, and we
would welcome any other feedback as well, positive or negative. (Please post any comments in this thread, or email us directly at curator@cryptobotany.org)

--Andrew Steckley
P.S. I apologize if this is the incorrect place (or prefix label) to make this announcement.

An interesting project, though I wonder if anonymous popular vote is really a good way to rank Voynich plant proposals.
 
Is the input currently limited to the table on Rene's website?

(15-09-2023, 11:09 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.An interesting project, though I wonder if anonymous popular vote is really a good way to rank Voynich plant proposals.
 
Is the input currently limited to the table on Rene's website?

Actually, you cannot vote on any of the proposals (or comment on them) if you remain anonymous -- you must at least register to provide your email and a display name.
But to keep the bar low for participation and to welcome suggestions from as wide an audience as we can (and not just our community of dedicated "Voynich enthusiasts"), it allows anyone to make a proposal without registering -- their proposal just gets listed as proposed by "Anonymous".   

Anyone can input to the table by making a proposed identification or (if registering themselves) they can vote or add comments.
The data you currently see at this time is mostly that which has been preloaded in order to present all the past proposals by Voynich researchers back to E. Voynich. We've collected this data from several sources, including but not limited to, Rene's website. 
We are continuing to collect more and to refine and correct that already loaded.

Thanks for your feedback!
Andrew

(15-09-2023, 11:19 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Anyone can input to the table by making a proposed identification or (if registering themselves) they can vote or add comments.

The data you currently see at this time is mostly that which has been preloaded in order to present all the past proposals by Voynich researchers back to E. Voynich. We've collected this data from several sources, including but not limited to, Rene's website. 

We are continuing to collect more and to refine and correct that already loaded.

First, I love this project. I think it may really help with getting a consensus on VM plant identification. I'm wondering though if someone else has tried something like this before (i.e. a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for VM plants, and, no, I checked and they don't have one). I know others besides Rene have compiled tables of plant IDs, probably overlapping each other. I'll look for some and post them in this thread as I find them again, just in case.

I do have a suggestion to improve the data you collect. Instead of one vote agree or disagree each plant, could you make that an overall agree/disagree match and then add additional criteria that can also be voted agree/disagree? That is to say, when I look at one of the VM plants, I gauge how much of a match it is:

• Does the VM plant appear to be one plant or two separate ones (if two separate, each plant should be considered separately but there is a lot of debate as to whether any VM plant images might be two plants instead of one)?
  
• Does the VM plant appear to be a tree, a vine, a moss, a fern, a flowering plant (I'm probably missing a few aspects in this list)?
  
• What kind of root system does the VM plant appear to have?
  
• If the VM plant is flowering, what are the aspects of the flowers (cluster/no cluster, point up or down, type of petals, type of receptacle; I consider color but I also consider colors in the VM plants to be suspect and not a good aspect or at least a lesser important one for matching)?
  
• What shape are the leaves in the VM plant?
  
• What are the leaf edges like in the VM plant?
  

Almost invariably, any plant I try to match to a VM plant will match to at least some degree on certain aspects and not so much or not at all on others. So whether I truly believe a plant is a potential match (I'm never 100% certain) is always highly dependent on how much of a match it is in each of the above aspects with certain aspects being less important, if even applicable, than others depending on the VM plant's appearance. I think this is an important consideration for any consensus rather than just a simple overall agree/disagree.

Another suggestion I have is to include more data on each plant and to consider extinct plants as well as extant. When did it enter the taxa (that is, earliest entry, even if under a previous or alternative name)? Where was it first discovered and where would it have been considered native and where introduced in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance? What environment does it thrive in? Was it a commodity and if so how rare or common? Often I find a proposed plant is not enough of a match to consider further but it is enough of a match that there could be a potential plant match, extinct or extant, in the same family or genus worth exploring and considering. I'm a big fan of cross-referencing proposed plants with the academic, professional and amateur botanical sites (click You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for a list I put together in another thread), as well as Wikipedia and also other herbal manuscripts. Including some of this data for each proposed plant will help inform and validate opinions and votes, instead of encouraging snap judgments that might be based more on a picture than a description or a feeling rather than scientific data. Voters don't have to be botanists but they should give careful consideration.

Just a few thoughts I had. I'm looking forward to helping out with this project.

Thank you for the great feedback merrimacga!

The component voting (and/or non-binary voting) idea is something we've been considering and we'll give it more thought now.  I would love to add in the depth of features that you have suggested.  (We are waiting first to see if the application receives enough activity to justify the time and effort to do so.) 

The creation of the site so far has taken considerable effort with the programming, but also with the clipping, cleaning up, and processing of the 134 plant images, and the collection and compilation of previous plant identification proposals from previous researchers and their publishings.

This project actually arose as an unplanned side project from some other Voynich-related research efforts that we are currently active on.

I do want to extend and refine (and ensure accuracy) the historical data that has been preloaded -- that is, all the proposals entered into the app as if from the previous researchers, and this is a task that others could readily help us with. (Any volunteers?)
And,  hopefully, some of the historical researchers who are still with us might take over the accounts that we have set up in their name so as to confirm and refine their entries.

We do plan to add more reference links on the About page to guide people to the many useful websites and resources (this forum, etc.).   I will also add the great list of botanical resources that you provided in your other posting (with credit to you.)

Thanks!
--Andrew

Hi Andrew,

i can't make any suggestions for plant identification. When submitting, the web page loads endlessly. The problem exists browser independent ( Firefox or Google Chrome ). - My operating system is Linux.

Some time ago, Marco Ponzi and I transcribed ELV's notebook (at least the first part, those pages scanned by Lisa Fagin Davis). See here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Her identifications are more extensive than those found online so far. For example, for f2r, she has centaurea. Right now, the website has centaurea for Stephen Bax, but obviously ELV has precedence. How would this work?

(16-09-2023, 01:23 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Andrew,

i can't make any suggestions for plant identification. When submitting, the web page loads endlessly. The problem exists browser independent ( Firefox or Google Chrome ). - My operating system is Linux.

Thank you for reporting this and thanks for your patience! We have fixed that problem. (Caused by my own fat fingers last night.). Please try again.

(16-09-2023, 03:30 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you for reporting this and thanks for your patience! We have fixed that problem. (Caused by my own fat fingers last night.). Please try again.

Thanks, now it works. Only the downvote button does not appear.

(16-09-2023, 01:37 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How would this work?

Thanks, Koen, I appreciate this feedback.

The best way at the moment is to submit this information directly on the proposal as a comment (with reference to sources if possible). We will attempt to respond to such comments and make requested corrections requests as soon as time permits. We could use some help in adding more information from sources as well (including yours. I apologize that we did not have it in our initial set of sources.) I will PM you later about how we might collaborate to process more of the previously published information and will make a modification on the particular case you mentioned later today too.


By the way, as described on the About page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., we took an expedited procedure to collect and process the historical researcher data.

To add a bit more detail to how it was done:
We manually went through several online sources that mentioned or summarized specific plant identifications, copied/pasted very rough information for each into a spreadsheet, and then wrote several processing programs to clean up, standardize each row of information,  invoke AI Models (e.g. ChatGPT)  to augment each one with scientific names, other common names, ranges, etc. and then finally generated SQL scripts to create a "proxy" user for each researcher and to load all the proposals into the application database (turning multiple mentions by different researchers into comments on the more-or-less earliest one) to simulate the historical researchers entering data in The Voynich Garden as far back as 1945.

This was done simply to get the bulk of available historical data loaded in a reasonable time, but of course, it means there are a lot of improvements that can now be made. 
As I mentioned, I will PM you later today regarding this topic.


Thanks,
Andrew



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(16-09-2023, 03:34 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2023, 03:30 PM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thank you for reporting this and thanks for your patience! We have fixed that problem. (Caused by my own fat fingers last night.). Please try again.

Thanks, now it works. Only the downvote button does not appear.

The downvote button should not appear on one's own proposal The fact that you made the proposal is taken as an implicit vote for the proposal.
Hope that makes sense.