Brainstorming Session: Mapping Voynich with Graphs

[Jorge_Stolfi]

As a concrete example, I started with the first lines of paragraphs (what I call L1) and compared them to all other lines. Building co-occurrence graphs, the L1 network consistently comes out denser and more tightly clustered.

Hi!  This general line of inquiry is important and I hope it gives some useful insights.

Using graphs to model relationships between VMS words is not a new idea.  (I seem to recall a French Ph. D. thesis that built a graph where the nodes were words and edges connected words that were similar in some metric, perhaps edit distance.)  But there are always many original ways to do it.

It is not surprising that parag head lines (L1) come out as more similar to each other than to other lines.  Through all sections, those lines are written with different "spelling" conventions than other lines, apparently just because they are head lines.  This seems to have been a not uncommon way to highlight parag breaks at the time.  Compare with our tradition of Capitalizing Most (But Not All) Words in Titles of Papers and Sections.  A martian who abducted one or our books might get quite baffled by the apparent different "encryption" of those lines.  The rule for that "embellishing" transformation is not yet understood, and may be partly random, partly ambiguous.

Once I mapped each page to a point in N-space according to the frequency of certain N common words in it.  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows selected 2D projections of those points.  Colors identify sections and lines connect pages that are consecutive in the book.  But more useful would be to connect pages that are most similar, in that or some other metric; since this graph might reveal the original order of the pages.

All the best, --jorge