The Voynich Ninja

I have put the publisher's "blurb" for the essay on folio 86v (Beinecke foliation 85v and 86r) on academia.edu.

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This is one of nine essays to be published in the book, seven (including the essay on the map) are already in the hands of the publisher.  The essay included, but expands upon what I've offered online in almost thirty detailed studies since 2011, twenty-six of those shorter articles available through voynichimagery.wordpress.com.

The essays, with index and bibliography is due to be completed by end of this year, pending permissions for the large number of illustrations required.

As always, I am concerned to properly acknowledge precedents, whether or not I consulted them, and am happy to receive emails at voynichimagery ... gmail

(24-04-2016, 08:27 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

As always, I am concerned to properly acknowledge precedents, whether or not I consulted them, and am happy to receive emails at voynichimagery ... gmail

You know, Diane, this is just my opinion but the way I see it, if someone comes along and says, for example, "I think this might be ___[insert some obscure language]____" and doesn't follow it up, doesn't do the legwork, doesn't research it and doesn't post findings, I see no reason to acknowledge it as a precedent. It's not. It's just tossing ideas out there. Anyone can do that, I've seen one guy propose about 16 different languages, and one might be correct through sheer chance, not because he actually knew what he was talking about.

There are scads of people throwing out ideas about the VMS, but if they don't do some kind of analysis (whether visual, statistical, or linguistic), so what if they mentioned it? It's meaningless until someone comes along and does the work to support or deny that idea and that person doesn't necessarily know that it was previously thrown into the ring and didn't necessarily benefit one iota even if it were because it's so easy to spout ideas. I know a guy who thinks he's a great novelist because he has a new idea for a novel every week. Well, a good idea is absolutely essential, but it's only 1% of the work and he's never written down a single word and never will.


Anyone can say, "The drawings might be ancient legends," or ,"The drawings might be coded political commentary," or "The drawings might be derived from _______ texts," and be correct but they don't KNOW if it's correct if they just threw out an idea, and whoever follows it up is the one who deserves credit for recognizing WHICH direction to go and confirming it.


I think we should be as discriminating in quoting precedents as we are in doing our research. Give credit where credit is due.

JKP - I agree that tossing out an idea does not create a precedent, but it's a thin line. Sometimes the only thing we can do to demonstrate an idea is provide suitable images for comparison.

I mean, if knowing whether or not something is correct defines precedent, there's not much of it in Voynich studies. 

You can spend months chasing an idea, without much to show for at the end of the ride. Maybe all you can say is: I think x is y, but I haven't found any images or quotes to support it, so it remains unsupported until someone does find them.

But I fully agree that randomly stating an idea without working on it does not create precedent. If I remember correctly, Diane has stated that she shares this view as well.

Diane - I hope your book isn't delayed too much by formalities and such, can't wait to read it

(25-04-2016, 04:36 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP - I agree that tossing out an idea does not create a precedent, but it's a thin line. Sometimes the only thing we can do to demonstrate an idea is provide suitable images for comparison.

I mean, if knowing whether or not something is correct defines precedent, there's not much of it in Voynich studies. 

You can spend months chasing an idea, without much to show for at the end of the ride. Maybe all you can say is: I think x is y, but I haven't found any images or quotes to support it, so it remains unsupported until someone does find them...

There's nothing wrong with tossing out ideas. I am a big supporter of brainstorming and would be the last to discourage that. And... I know about following trails that may never pan out (I've been working on a slim one for years)... but that's not quite my point...

If Researcher A tosses out some idea in 2013 and Researcher B follows a similar trail in 2014 (with or without the knowledge of researcher A's comment) and Researcher B follows up, finds support for the idea, and documents it, who deserves the citation? Researcher A may only have been guessing. If you offer enough guesses, some will pan out by sheer chance and I've seen people in the academic world try to claim credit for something they guessed or even joked about but did nothing to actually research.

With that, I totally agree. It would be unfair to have to attribute credit to someone who just guesses a lot. If there's anything that we don't want to encourage in Voynich studies, it's guessing a lot

I don't see anything wrong with what JKP is writing above.

Now of course, if:
- over the years whole groups of researchers have shared one observation about the MS (drawing "A" looks like "X") ,
  without knowing if it's right or wrong (i.e. drawing "A" really represents "X");
- and then researcher N comes along claiming to be the first to identify drawing "A" as "X";

then researcher N could write, for example, something along the lines of:

Quote:Over the years many people have suggested that drawing "A" represents "X". Here, we will examine a particular case, namely that ... (etc). We believe that this is the first detailed analysis of this type.

There would be nothing wrong with that!


If, instead, researcher N claims to be the first to say that drawing "A" is "X",  then this is clearly false.
Especially if this false claim has been pointed out to researcher N by several people, many times, over many years.

In the end, it all depends on the wording.

Anyone claiming to be the first with something has to
- be very clear *which aspect* precisely is a first
- be sufficiently certain that nobody did this before

In the case of the observation that the rosettes folio looks like a map, there is a section in Nick Pelling's "curse" printed in 2006 in which he discusses in great detail that the upper right circle represents (in his opinion) the city of Milan, tentatively identifying several buildings. The central circle he associates with the city of Venice. All of this is based on earlier work by himself that was partly shared on internet resources.

Whether I believe that Nick's analysis is correct or not doesn't matter. The same is true for Marco Ponzi's analysis published at the blog of Stephen Bax or Jürgen's here at Ninja. All of them are detailed. All of them are different.
The last two, which are both relatively recent, both acknowledge that Diane has been doing similar work.

Nick's is a printed book. Marco's is a blog entry. I don't know what is the purpose of the other two, but how to refer to online resources from printed media isn't completely clear to me, and this is of course changing with the emergence of E-journals and E-books.

(26-04-2016, 07:25 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Nick's is a printed book. Marco's is a blog entry. I don't know what is the purpose of the other two, but how to refer to online resources from printed media isn't completely clear to me, and this is of course changing with the emergence of E-journals and E-books.

I've been mulling this over as well.

It's a completely different world now. Publications used to be vetted by editors and peer review panels, now anyone has the capability of ePublishing (whether in book or blog form) and while there's a lot of nonsense out there, there is also some excellent professional work.

If the person has their own domain and blog and a certain amount of permanence, it's not as difficult to cite the source. When the information is more ephemeral or written under a pseudo, it's not as easy to credit (or even to find again).

Dear colleagues, please let me encourage you to adhere to our rules of this subforum :

Hello Anton,

point understood, however if the article in question is really going to be published more formally, it would be under review, it should not be made public, and there will be no possibility to discuss it here.
In that respect it could make sense to close the thread.

Hi Rene,

Actually I had an impression that Diane announced part of a book having been put for advanced preview or something like that, and it is available from Diane upon request. Am I not correct?

This subforum has been designed to serve the purprose of VMS-related announcements of all sorts - blog posts, articles, books etc. (not necessarily authored by the thread starters!), in order to keep the users informed about what's going on in the Voynich world.

Of course it would be nice to have announcement of a complete book out of press and ready for purchase instead  but I see no obstacles to having this announcement here.