30-09-2023, 03:45 PM
I've had a few people ask questions related to background aspects of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. application that was announced in a separate You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
So I thought I'd provide a bit of context on that here:
The application was not really meant as a research platform for all the detailed analysis of the plants in the Voynich Manuscript,
so much as a way to just collect candidate plant identifications from a lot of people who might know plants but who may have never heard of the manuscript. (There is a surprisingly large number of members in special interest groups dedicated to plant identification.)
But it turns out that it provides a great place to bring together in one place and format, all the various proposals regarding the plants in the manuscript for easier access and reference in doing research on the manuscript. (A couple of prominent Voynich Manuscript researchers have told me they are finding it very useful for their active research efforts.)
Personally, I also hope the cleaned-up images of the plants provide a very useful alternative view that helps one inspect the plant illustrations more easily because making those cleaned-up images was a sizable effort. Even with several automation tools that I developed it involved many hours of tedious work that was hard on the eyes. (You can swap between the cleaned-up image and the original full folio image using the center button at the top of the plant image, by the way.)
Actually, those cleaned-up images of the plants were the impetus for the whole project in the first place.
I had developed a separate application for stepping through the manuscript, clipping out rectangular sections, and storing them in a database. The purpose was to clip out individual glyphs, worse, and paragraphs for other analysis efforts. I also added a feature to draw, clip, and store arbitrary polygons and annotate them with notes, so one could also collect images of other artifacts besides the script. At that point, we noticed how helpful it was to clip out a plant and look at it separately from the distractions of the script or other shadow images and blemishes. So we conceived The Voynich Garden and made some further processing programs to expedite the clipping of the plants and to mount them into their own images.
As we developed the application, it begged to include all of the various plant proposals that researchers had made over the last century. This launched a separate effort to develop various software tools to help collect those from various online sources, standardize them, and load them into the application with their references to the original proposers.
We have not done much to try to promote the application yet. And we will see if it gets enough users to justify maintaining it for the long run.
But thanks for all the comments and feedback that I've received so far!
So I thought I'd provide a bit of context on that here:
The application was not really meant as a research platform for all the detailed analysis of the plants in the Voynich Manuscript,
so much as a way to just collect candidate plant identifications from a lot of people who might know plants but who may have never heard of the manuscript. (There is a surprisingly large number of members in special interest groups dedicated to plant identification.)
But it turns out that it provides a great place to bring together in one place and format, all the various proposals regarding the plants in the manuscript for easier access and reference in doing research on the manuscript. (A couple of prominent Voynich Manuscript researchers have told me they are finding it very useful for their active research efforts.)
Personally, I also hope the cleaned-up images of the plants provide a very useful alternative view that helps one inspect the plant illustrations more easily because making those cleaned-up images was a sizable effort. Even with several automation tools that I developed it involved many hours of tedious work that was hard on the eyes. (You can swap between the cleaned-up image and the original full folio image using the center button at the top of the plant image, by the way.)
Actually, those cleaned-up images of the plants were the impetus for the whole project in the first place.
I had developed a separate application for stepping through the manuscript, clipping out rectangular sections, and storing them in a database. The purpose was to clip out individual glyphs, worse, and paragraphs for other analysis efforts. I also added a feature to draw, clip, and store arbitrary polygons and annotate them with notes, so one could also collect images of other artifacts besides the script. At that point, we noticed how helpful it was to clip out a plant and look at it separately from the distractions of the script or other shadow images and blemishes. So we conceived The Voynich Garden and made some further processing programs to expedite the clipping of the plants and to mount them into their own images.
As we developed the application, it begged to include all of the various plant proposals that researchers had made over the last century. This launched a separate effort to develop various software tools to help collect those from various online sources, standardize them, and load them into the application with their references to the original proposers.
We have not done much to try to promote the application yet. And we will see if it gets enough users to justify maintaining it for the long run.
But thanks for all the comments and feedback that I've received so far!