Publishing negative research

[Barbrey]

I'm proud to announce that the last two posts on my blog have, more or less, been failures. They prove no hypothesis nor advance our understanding. They even go against some of the things I believed or proposed, or at best leave those questions no nearer to an answer.

But publishing them is still important. Showing what we've done helps others by laying out our lines of reasoning, sharing our statistics and observations, and demonstrating that they don't really fit our hypotheses.

I encourage everybody to post their failures and be open when lines of enquiry run dead (or totally unproven).

Emma May, you're the bomb!  Thank you for admitting your failures (which let's face it is 99.9999% of Voynich research or it would be solved by now) and encouraging others to do so too.  I have yet to publish a full thread or article on my ideas on the Voynich, because I keep tripping up on details where I have to recant or re-order.  Recently, I suggested the bottom left symbol on the rosettes page might be a clock after all, only to be told clocks did not have second hands in that time period.  I wish we had pages we could use to look up what has been disproved, the "failures", already.

Anyway, I am glad you're not discouraged because I read your posts with a great deal of interest, and best of all you write with such clarity, I can often understand your statistics!  This post makes me feel braver.