Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[magnesium]

 

These findings suggest that topic modeling not only helps cluster content by lexical features, but also reflects deeper structural patterns of authorship and writing practices in the manuscript. It supports the idea that different scribes may have introduced or emphasized different "topics", even when writing in the same Currier language.

I'd be very interested to hear your interpretations or see comparisons with other modeling approaches.

Just thinking of the naibbe cipher, could it be that each scribe had it's own encryption table? What is the scribral frequency? Would it match the 5-3-1-1 naibbe distribution? Regardless,  I think these are extremely interesting results.

Just to add here, Naibbe ciphertexts exhibit language-dependent and topic-dependent variation in word frequencies, for the simple reason that alphabet letter and plaintext bigram frequencies can vary by language and topic. For example, because it uses the word “herba” very often, a herbal plaintext might have more Bs than an astrology text, holding the language constant across both texts. As an exercise, I recommend that people do NMF on my reference Naibbe ciphertexts, using 1000-5000 tokens as the “document” subdivision. Each of those reference texts is equal parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Book 16 of Pliny’s Natural History, Grosseteste’s De sphaera, and the Latin alchemical herbal. The Divine Comedy portion will cleanly separate out, as will the alchemical herbal section. De sphaera and Natural History will tend to resemble each other a bit more.