The Voynich Ninja

Here it is! A very lengthy piece in The Atlantic about my thirty-year friendship with the VMS and new directions for research. Shout-outs to the Team Malta, Claire Bowern, and others:

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Enjoy!

That was a great read and it was lovely to read more about your background, Lisa. I had no idea you had to field emails from the cranks and can't say I envy you.

The primary sources for the article appear to be interviews with Lisa Davis and Claire Bowern, which may have led to a false portrayal of the Voynich manuscript. As a result, the article does not provide an accurate description of the manuscript itself.

For instance the article states "The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words were similarly language-like." The contrary is true. The word length distribution matches almost perfectly a binomial distribution and is therefore not language like (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Jürgen Hermes states "When looking at word lengths the text of the VMS is astonishingly uniform (hardly any words have less than 3 or more than 10 characters). Even more surprising is the similar behaviour of type lengths and token lengths. Although Voynichese tokens are also slightly shorter on average than types, the word length distributions of both, types and tokens, is almost binomial" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].

The article also states: "Certain words, moreover, seemed to follow one another in predictable order, a possible sign of grammar."
However "one of the most puzzling features of the VMS is its weak word order" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]. D'Imperio wrote in 1978: "Also the strange lack of parallel context surrounding different occurrences off the 'same' word as shown by word indexes. In the words of several researchers ' the text just doesn't act like natural language'" [D'Imperio 1976, p. 30]. Even Claire Bowern states about the distribution of words within a line: "All of these observations lead to generalizations that seem typographical rather than linguistic in nature" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.1].

The article further states "Finally, each of the text’s sections—as defined by the drawings of plants, stars, bathing women, and so on—had different sets of overrepresented words, just as one would expect in a real book whose chapters focused on different subjects." 
However in natural languages the most frequent words "are distributed equally over the entire text, the so-called function words (like conjunctions, articles etc.). They do not appear contextual, but rather serve to implement grammatical structures, and they normally do not have co-occurring similar words of comparable frequency. In the VMS frequently used tokens differ from page to page" [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].

The idea of a relation between illustration and text goes back to a paper of Montemurro et al. from 2013 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). Their research is based on the idea that "uninformative words tend to have an approximately homogeneous (Poissonian) distribution" and "the most relevant words are scattered more irregularly, and their occurrences are typically clustered". However, they did not verify whether words with a homogeneous (Poissonian) distribution are present in the Voynich text. Than in 2021 a paper of Claire Bowern assumes that "Montemurro et al. (2013) use techniques from information theory to identify which words are most likely to contribute to topics in texts. That is, they identify words that are more uniformly distributed throughout the Voynich Manuscript and compare them with those that tend to cluster." (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But Bowern also didn't verify if uniformly distributed words exist. In fact, uniformly distributed words doesn't exist within the Voynich text [see Timm & Schinner 2020, p. 6]. Montemurro et al., along with Claire Bowern, incorrectly assume that it is possible to differentiate between uniformly distributed words and topic-specific words within the Voynich manuscript. This assumption leads them to a flawed conclusion: they erroneously infer that there is a meaningful correlation between the topics suggested by the manuscript's illustrations and the distribution of words in the text. See also the review of the linguist Chris Chrisomalis You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and of René Zandbergen: This does not demonstrate "that the text variations are caused by different subject matter (as suggested in by Montemurro and Zanette). If that were the case, the difference between herbal A and herbal B should not exist. The cause of the (statistical) language variation is still unexplained." [You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.].

My main criticism would be that the article paints a story of crazy theorists vs academics. This completely leaves out the fact that there has always been a strong field of non-academic research of the MS, separate from crazy theorists. (Many of the presenters at the Malta conference were amateur researchers or academics from unrelated fields). Now on the other hand I do believe Lisa's involvement has been critical in improving the relationship between the VM and the academic world, which is understandably the focus of the narrative in this piece. 

Torsten: much of your criticism is justified, but well, this is an article in the Atlantic, not a scientific review. We can't expect the author to judge on things we ourselves can't even agree on.

(13-08-2024, 12:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My main criticism would be that the article paints a story of crazy theorists vs academics. This completely leaves out the fact that there has always been a strong field of non-academic research of the MS, separate from crazy theorists. (Many of the presenters at the Malta conference were amateur researchers or academics from unrelated fields). Now on the other hand I do believe Lisa's involvement has been critical in improving the relationship between the VM and the academic world, which is understandably the focus of the narrative in this piece. 

I understand that the author is trying to make the story more engaging by focusing on Lisa Fagin Davis.

(13-08-2024, 12:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten: much of your criticism is justified, but well, this is an article in the Atlantic, not a scientific review. We can't expect the author to judge on things we ourselves can't even agree on.

I’m not criticizing the author for the inaccuracies; my critique is directed at the reliance on interviews with Lisa Davis and Claire Bowern as solely sources for an research field where much is still open to debate.

I agree with Torsten's criticism of this magazine article.

I appreciate the work of Lisa Fagis Davis. What surprises me is the ease in talking about women bathing and women's gynecology. I hope that one day art historians will join the investigation and I will not be the only one who makes a different interpretation.

(13-08-2024, 11:46 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The primary sources for the article appear to be interviews with Lisa Davis and Claire Bowern

You are guessing, and you are guessing wrong. I know of at least five people who have been involved, and there were probably more.

(13-08-2024, 11:46 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For instance the article states "The mix of word lengths and the ratio of unique words to total words were similarly language-like." The contrary is true. The word length distribution matches almost perfectly a binomial distribution and is therefore not language like

This suggests that there should exist a good test for what is language-lilke and what is not. Well I don't think so.
Stolfi did not write that the word length distribution is not language like, and anyway, Stolfi is not a linguist. Neither am I for that matter.

I can't decide for myself to what extent the text is language-like, but at first sight it is very language like, while in important details it is less so. Saying that it is not language-like would be more incorrect in my opinion.

(13-08-2024, 12:53 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten: much of your criticism is justified, but well, this is an article in the Atlantic, not a scientific review. We can't expect the author to judge on things we ourselves can't even agree on.

Interestingly, to me this is both right and wrong at the same time. The Atlantic approached this article in a very serious way, completely unlike any journalists' article I have ever witnessed. (Certainly infinitely better than whatever Romance journal published Cheshire's theories).
I agree that some things really cannot be judged - it is clear from Koen's recent presentation on Voynich Day 2024.

However, should 'we' be the reference?
I struggle to imagine who is 'we' when talking about the Voynich Ninja. All members combined?

I definitely agree that the author put a lot of time, effort and dedication into this article. He does not quote most people he talked to directly, but it all shaped the article into a solid narrative. I can see some instances where he clearly took into account what I talked to him about. Also, afterwards I was contacted by a separate fact checker who wanted me to confirm (or deny) some claims from the article. A mention of non-crazy amateur research would have been nice, but overall I was impressed by their dedication.

Rene: who is "we", that's a very good question, and a tricky one. "We" probably wouldn't be able to agree on that, either

The article is generally nice but it may create some wrong impression to a layman reader. You could think it's one enlightened scholar lady versus an army of crazy conspiracy wackos. 

And we know that people dealing with Voynich are a mixed bag of rational and irrational individuals.

This thread evolved into a separate discussion which has been moved here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.