Quote:davidjackson: This could be a way to identify "subjects" within the corpus. Sudden bursts of new words would suggest that a topic change has been introduced - something the larger scale graphs that I have posted above seem to show.
There are some patterns of self-similarity (almost fractal in nature, one might almost say echolalic) in some of the plant pages.
Look for example at the knapweed near the beginning (the one that resembles a dried specimen of Centaurea jacaea). In Latin (with abbreviations), one sees several variations of the word centaurus/centaura scattered through the text. If you wrote 9daur9 in Latin, it would be expanded as Contaurus or Centaurus or Centaurum, which would fit the identity of the plant. Latin allowed scribes to abbreviate in a variety of ways (more than one way to abbreviate a specific word and yet it would still be understood by different scribes) and it's almost as if the same thing has been abbreviated several times in slightly different ways.
Then if you look at the plant that resembles Ricinus (castor oil), you will see a lot of EVA-m. In Latin, EVA-m is the abbrevation for "ris" which is homophonic for "ric" in Ricinus, and it repeats more on this page than other pages. Once again, it has an echolalic feel to it.
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I think these patterns might qualify as "sudden bursts" of word-patterns that seem possibly related to the content of the drawings on specific pages