[Other] Uncovering Patterns in Indecipherable Books – The Voynich Manuscript

[tealeaf]

Hello all.

I saw this come up, and registered so that I could reply here.

I'm the one giving this lecture in Oxford. I wanted to confirm that, despite the fact that I've done a semi-serious analysis on some aspects of the Voynich as part of this, this is a lighthearted Halloween event mainly aimed as a seasonal bit of fun for our incoming students, with a focus on statistical and data science elements. While the Voynich isn't the spookiest of topics (last year was an analysis of UFO sightings...), it fits with the theme of applying data science to unusual and mysterious datasets.

I know that there's a lot of much more serious research into the Voynich going on, and the work I'll be presenting is actually intended to contribute to that in the longer term if I get around to writing it up academically. To be clear, though, this is definitely not an event aimed at serious scholars of the Voynich.

For anyone interested in the material before I present it, I'll mainly be giving a little bit of history and context, some of the statistical arguments around whether the text is a hoax, and an analysis that shows a potential change in authorship, writing style, or topic early in the manuscript based on the word frequency distributions. This was all written up a while ago, in a similarly light-hearted way, in a series of four blog posts starting here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I hope that sets the expectations accordingly!