Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

I have been working further on the topic analysis of the Voynich manuscript. As you might know, I am trying to detect topics throughout the text using an NMF model. Sorry to insist, but I think this analysis is leading me to confirm—at least from my current point of view—that the text has meaning and that it is related to the different sections.

I have created a GIF where you can see how the topics are distributed per section and per folio in the section (the plot titles are maybe confusing), starting from the detection of 2 topics and going up to 15 topics:

• With 2 topics you can already see a considerable difference between the Herbal and Biological sections.
  
• With 3 topics, part of the orange topic begins to transform into green, while the blue topic remains consistent in the Biological and Marginal Stars (Recipes) sections.
  
• With 4 topics, the first part of the Herbal folios clearly stands out, where the orange topic predominates.
  
• As the number of topics increases, the detection gains granularity and topics get mixed, but each section still shows different mixtures. For example, note the division of the orange topic when moving from 7 to 8 topics.
  
• At higher topic numbers, the granularity becomes very fine. Even so, we can still see clear differences between sections.
  

This leads me to the opinion that the Voynich has meaning, and that this meaning is also linked to the sections (and their drawings).

In the coming days, I plan to:

• Detect topics within each section (instead of across the whole Voynich).
  
• Examine how language and handwriting influence topic detection.
  

If you have other suggestions, please let me know.

I hope you find this interesting.