[Blog Post] Rightward and Downward in the Voynich Manuscript - Patrick Feaster

[pfeaster]

Really interesting, thanks, but I'd also benefit from an explanation of how these charts work.

Daiin does appear in line initial positions more than it "ought" to, so I'm not surprised if that's what the brightness is signifying here.  But I'd also expect the rest to be more "glowy" - is it less bright because its middle-line occurrences are more spread out?  But then we'd expect that with the others too.  It would be good to see them all in the same colour scheme so we can compare.

Here's an explanatory diagram that may help clarify how these charts are designed to work.

   

For these examples, I expanded the horizontal and vertical dimensions using a "blockier" algorithm than usual so that the individual data points are easier to see (otherwise I've been using a first-order spline interpolation).  For each vord token that fits the target criteria, a rectangle of ones gets added to the blank canvas in the corresponding place with its width inversely proportional to line length and its height inversely proportional to paragraph length.  Once all tokens have been added, all pixel values are divided by the maximum and then multiplied by 255 to yield an 8-bit image, brightest where the greatest number of rectangles overlap.  The effect of "spreading out" mid-line and mid-paragraph tokens is an open question.