Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[magnesium]

Hello Magnesium,

I have doubts how to process your reference Naibbe ciphertexts.

- shall i process all of them one after the other? In case it is yes, which is the order, the alphabetical order of the files?
- how should I divide the paragraphs or pages?  Or should I take one file as a "page" every time. For topic processing I need to separate the texts so the progam can find the topics of he texts (one topic per text). How should I separate the texts?

Once I have the pages (or the chunks of texts that should be given a topic), I can show you the results and see if it is coherent. I don't know which real text is in each file.

Thank you

All 20 of the reference ciphertexts encrypt an identical 32,000-letter plaintext. The plaintext is equal parts (aka 8,000 letters each) of Pliny's Natural History (Book 16), Grosseteste's De sphaera, the Latin alchemical herbal, and Dante's Divine Comedy (though not necessarily in that order...it might be fun to try and figure out the ordering!). The ciphertexts vary between 20,000 and 21,000 tokens long, roughly, with the variation stemming from random fluctuations in the application of the cipher.

If you want to analyze a given Naibbe ciphertext as if it were a synthetic Voynich B, divide each ciphertext into four equal portions, aka each ~5000-5500 tokens long, and then subdivide from there. Each fourth will roughly correspond with one of the original plaintext sections. There are no exact equivalents to folios in these ciphertexts, but you could explore the statistical effect of smaller subdivisions by treating each ciphertext as if it were a corpus of N different documents each one roughly (total/N) tokens long, just as you have been doing with the various folios of the VMS.