[Article] Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library?

[Torsten]

There is a paper from 2016 about the VMS: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
The preprint version of the paper by Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Iván González, Gerardo Vidal and Miguel Angel Fuentes is available at arxiv.org: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

The authors come to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript contains "a written text which has been ciphered, possibly by a permutation process of its words".

The authors build networks for adjacent words for text samples of different kings. One outcome for the network build for the Voynich manuscript is that it contained the "only analyzed text that does not present a significant difference between assortativities before and after randomization." 

They conclude that the "anomalous behaviors with respect to clustering and assortativity between its original and ciphered versions, suggest that the manuscript is a ciphered text, even with a lower disassortativity. We use the term ciphered because the manuscript has a word frequency distribution that follows Zipf’s law, and because the correlation between <C> and <l> also fits the power function of other texts."