How could we approach the Pharma and Recipes?

[Anton]

Which other methods can be used to search for patterns and to compare Q20 and the Pharma section to other texts?

Well, in fact this thread invites the discussion of what answers can we give to this question.

The criterion that you proposed is already a great start, we can use that to make a better guess of the exact type of "instructions" (instead of the narrow and sometimes inadequate term "recipes" I suggest to call these repetitive homogenious blocks "instructions") that Pharma and Q20 contain.

What I think of for now (and what I have in mind to do with MsMurQ12 when I'm ready with my transcription), is to look at top-N (say, top-5, or, at most, top-10) words and see if that significantly differs between instructions of different kinds (would be great to compare between different languages as well). If it does not, then we could take the respective top-N of Pharma and/or Q20 and see if we can build a mapping.

Follow-ups would be: to build a table of most common nouns and to see if any patterns are exhibited in the words which open the paragraphs. E.g. for instructions of type A, they usually begin with nouns, for instructions of type B, they usually begin with prepositions, etc.

Another thing is to find most common phrases (two- or, at most, three-word phrases), like perhaps "so nim" or the like, and then seek for the like patterns in the VMS.

I believe if we dig deeply, we can greatly advance here.

The botanical section offers the same opportunities (that's why initially I started wih that a few years ago), but the patterns there may be weaker. Each botanical folio is of the same "rank" as others, but paragraphs within each folio may be completely irregular.