Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

What happens if you run the pipeline on some gibberish text, like the output of Torsten Timms autogenerator.

Hello Rob,


This was one of the tests I wanted to carry out. Here’s what I did: I generated two different texts using Timm's generator. I replaced the real Voynich words with Torsten's text, in the same order. So, if the first MS paragraph has, let’s say, 40 words, I took the first 40 words of Timm's text, and so on. I also did the following: I took all the real Voynich words and randomly shuffled them, so that every Voynich word appears in a random position, but the overall corpus remains the same. Here are the results:



Torsten Timm 1:





Torsten Timm 2:




Randomized Voynich:





Voynich:




As you can see, the topics found in Torsten Timm's texts, even if they are not as flat as a purely random text, don’t provide any clue to a real topic. There are small parts that seem to hint at different topic usage, but I think that’s just coincidence. No real topic emerges; no section clearly differs from the rest. For the randomized Voynich, it is even more evident that the text is completely random, without meaning.

But look again at the Voynich sections! This makes my opinion even stronger (personal, of course): that the Voynich does have meaning—or at least some underlying structure connected to its sections or drawings. Depending on the part we “read,” we find a different topic compared to other parts of the manuscript.