Questions for Adam Lewis

[Koen G]

This Thursday, David and I will have a chat with Adam Lewis, a student at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma in Washington, who is writing a thesis entitled “An Anatomy of Failure: Analysis Attempts to Decode the Voynich Manuscript”.

If there is any question you'd like us to ask, you can post them in this thread.

[Anton]

Well, the first thing is that it would be nice to have the thesis (when it's ready) publicly available on the internet, if of course the local copyright law allows that.

With no particulars of the thesis being disclosed as of yet, I would be interested to know whether Adam discusses the problem of the effective methodology, - of approaching the decoding in the right way, - or he merely discusses past attempts from the "as is" perspective.

[VViews]

As Anton said, without having seen the work it is hard to be specific about it. 
But I would have a few questions:
Over at Nick Pelling's blog, there was a comment pointing out that "James Comegys, author of Keys for the Voynich Scholar (2001) attended University of Puget Sound 1969-70." I'm curious, is there a connection there? 
Also curious to know how Adam Lewis' professors reacted to his thesis subject : what views did they offer? Were they encouraging or wary?
Of course, since his paper seems to focus mainly on the theories of others,  I would also like to ask if has a theory of his own about the Voynich! 

[MarcoP]

I would like to know Adam's point of view about these subjects:

* What are the definitions of "failure" and "success" in the area of Voynich research?

* Some believe that attempts to read the manuscript always fail because the ms is meaningless. What can be said about this option?

* Many decoding attempts go for an overarching interpretation, often to the extreme of providing "translations" of whole passages. Would an approach based on smaller steps provide better hopes for actual progress?

[Koen G]

I'll just add that Adam said he'll mail me an overview of his paper's contents before the interview. If I receive it on time I'll add it to this thread.

[Koen G]

This is what he sent me:

- Brief background of the Voynich Manuscript
- A list (+ brief explanations) of notable interesting linguistic features of the manuscript
- One major section of my thesis is looking at examples of successful translation/decryption efforts made on things that are unrelated to the VMS
- Specifically, I analyze Michael Ventris and John Chadwick’s successful decipherment of Linear B and David Stein’s mostly successful decryption of the Kryptos sculpture at the CIA headquarters
- Looking at those two case studies, I pull out elements that seem to be correlated to a successful translation/decryption attempt (namely corpus size, external reference, and methodology/approach)
- I then talk about how this combination of factors has not been present in decryption/translation attempts of the Voynich Manuscript
- I look at a specific recent example of the Gibbs attempt in September 2017 (written about by the Times Literary Supplement You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and The Atlantic You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and explain what about that attempt is flawed
- I conclude with my thoughts on how the Voynich Manuscript cannot, in its current state at least, be successfully decrypted/translated, and what the most convincing argument that I’ve read is (the hoax hypothesis)

The interview is tomorrow evening, so your questions are still welcome. David won't be able to make it, so I'll try to do this interview solo. Unless one of you would like to co-host

[ReneZ]

I knew it 

Do ask him what he thinks of Gordon Rugg's work.

[Hubert Dale]

Why did he pick Linear B and the Kryptos sculpture as case studies? What assumptions are implicit in these choices? 

Why is Kryptos a better choice than a cipher known to be closer to the C-14 date for the Voynich Manuscript? 

How do you hope to ‘pull out elements that seem to be correlated to a successful translation/decryption attempt’ from considering only two, highly contrasting, case studies?

Good luck with the interview. Difficult when you’ve only got an outline to work with...

[Koen G]

I'm currently uploading the interview, will be available soon. I'll just add here that I did ask him about James Comegys, but this was not in the recorded interview. It's apparently a coincidence and he was not familiar with the name.