15-03-2020, 05:17 PM
@Marco thank you for that PDF file. I think it illustrates very well the general trend that the pharma labels do not recur in the paragraphs next to them. One can quibble with the allowances you've made (I would probably would have made all gallows equivalent, and made EVA n, m, and r all equivalent), but that's beside the point. Even with a lot of reasonable equivalencies, matches between labels and paragraphs are still rare.
I'm more and more open to the idea that if the VMS's text is meaningful, its meaning is purposely obscured. I remember someone (perhaps it was you?) recently demonstrating with statistics that medieval herbals in all languages show distinctive word distribution patterns at the paragraph and page levels, which are not matched at all in the VMS. So it's probably not an herbal, only designed to resemble one to mislead people from its real purpose.
Koen has a point. I think it's worth asking ourselves, "What use of writing in the Middle Ages would potentially feature a bullet list, where each bulleted phrase was accompanied by an 8~9 line paragraph that seldom ever included the bulleted phrase?"
The PDF made it easy to scan down the list of transcribed labels in the order they occur in the VMS. When I did I noticed something: each label is often fairly similar to the one before it, with only 1~2 characters different. Has anyone looked for patterns in these transformations, over the course of the entire set of pharma labels, preferably in the order in which the pages were originally bound? If a numbering system or alphabetical order could be wrangled out of these labels, based on the order they're written in, that could be very valuable. I'm going to spend some time staring at these a bit more with a scratch pad next to me, and see what I can discern.
I'm more and more open to the idea that if the VMS's text is meaningful, its meaning is purposely obscured. I remember someone (perhaps it was you?) recently demonstrating with statistics that medieval herbals in all languages show distinctive word distribution patterns at the paragraph and page levels, which are not matched at all in the VMS. So it's probably not an herbal, only designed to resemble one to mislead people from its real purpose.
Koen has a point. I think it's worth asking ourselves, "What use of writing in the Middle Ages would potentially feature a bullet list, where each bulleted phrase was accompanied by an 8~9 line paragraph that seldom ever included the bulleted phrase?"
The PDF made it easy to scan down the list of transcribed labels in the order they occur in the VMS. When I did I noticed something: each label is often fairly similar to the one before it, with only 1~2 characters different. Has anyone looked for patterns in these transformations, over the course of the entire set of pharma labels, preferably in the order in which the pages were originally bound? If a numbering system or alphabetical order could be wrangled out of these labels, based on the order they're written in, that could be very valuable. I'm going to spend some time staring at these a bit more with a scratch pad next to me, and see what I can discern.
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