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

[Koen G]

I guess what I mean is that there is a bit of a mismatch between the advanced methods used and the pretty obvious differences between Currier languages (like the f33 shift). You explain in the video how certain statistical methods can be used to detect differences we may not notice by eye, which I found very interesting. For example, we can see if a new author finished a book, and where the input of the new author starts. So while language, genre and subject stay the same, the method is still capable of picking out the new author's quirks.

But Currier "languages" have been known for decades and are clear enough to be noticed by someone without using a computer. So noting a shift in f33 is kind of like saying you used topic modeling to determine that French isn't Italian. In my opinion it would be much more interesting to determine where the shifts are within the same Currier languages, whether the different scribal hands identified by Lisa Fagin Davis can be seen in the statistics etc.