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

[pfeaster]

Each pair of recto and verso pages belong to the same folio. Therefore it would be a surprise if recto and verso groups groups would behave differently. 

Instead I suggest to divide for scribe 1 into Botanical/Pharmaceutical folios and for scribe 2 into Botanical/Biological folios.

That would be a worthwhile experiment too, but I think it would involve a subtly different question.  The recto/verso division only tests whether the patterns that seem to exist in the results for all pages attributed to a particular scribe still appear when we use only one or another half of the dataset.  The apparent patterns could be illusory, after all, and just artifacts of statistical noise.  But if the two halves of the dataset yield similar results, that suggests the patterns are real and meaningful.

The division you suggest would test the coherence of the scribal groupings themselves -- i.e., whether individual sections attributed to the same scribe are more like each other (in this way) than they are like sections attributed to other scribes.  I wasn't being quite that ambitious yet, but I agree it would be a good follow-up step, depending on the results of the first experiment.