Archive Proximity

[hatoncat]

The Biblioteca Civica Gambalunga looks like somewhere that might have historically interesting material to Voynich researchers. The difficulty is that there are many places that might have historically interesting material to Voynich researchers. Because of this it is difficult to know which are the best places to start to look for material. From my own perspective whilst interesting the Gambalunga is not one of the first places that I would look, though I think is certainly worthy of note.

I don't know how or why Kaspar von Silenen is relevant.

The concept that there are many places to look shouldn't deter someone from beginning the search in any of those places. It just means that there are many places to look. If there were enough people interested, all the libraries with ancient texts should be searched. Non-linear methodology can still accumulate clues that can improve the search as more information/clues become known. For example Kaspar von Silenen was the nephew of a Swiss Prince Bishop; Dr. Gregory Bernhart-Konigstein recently made the claim last month that he and his nephew co-wrote the Voynich Manuscript: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Thus to evaluate the claim, following an educated guess could still turn up a lot of unknown information about that era that was previously unknown- it might not reveal much about the VM, but it might lead to more clues about other events that could be ruled out. 

the way metadata is used in the 21st century actually has a lot of implications for historical knowledge. Only with the vast increases in computational processing has information in discrete manuscripts been able to be combined. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The definition of metadata might sound useless as random points, but only by manually connecting information that previously required manually visiting each library could now be done digitally. My point is, that hypothetically, if a Swiss library digitizes information from Latin into English from a 1500s text about the whereabouts of someone who also published a book about plants, then that data might not have ever been connected to information in an Italian library containing additional information on the same person. The least manual thing the libraries would need to do is to digitize all of the books, then someone could try to OCR-automate some of it, and then transcribe the rest. Once it is digitized, Latin could be translated into another language (with or without machine automation), and a person who is able to obtain a couple clues could connect far more information with just a couple tips, such as what city they were in and on what date. That is the power of metadata. It doesn't require any specific lead, but a bigger time line can be used to rule out certain theories.

Edit: In 2002, Google began an epic project to scan milions of books: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Rare books of course would need more delicate care, but many of the oldest ones precede copyright, although the choice is still up to the owners. So, idigitizing a lot of books allows more historical access, even though it might not preserve all the data in high res- that should also be considered, especially if there is a forgery or other detail in the text that can't be queried with a string search.