Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

That pattern looks like shared structure running through the book, not several unrelated streams of invented text.

In one of the few You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., back in the late 2nd millennium CE (at the IMPA Brazilian Mathematics Colloquium), I mentioned the use of word distribution similarity to infer the original nesting and folding of the Biology bifolios.  The relevant part of that file starts at slide/page 25.  The basic idea is to solve a Traveling Salesman Problem in N-space, by exhaustive enumeration of all possible page orders.  It is feasible because the physical pairing of pages and folios puts strong constraints on these orders.

I did not give the result in that talk because (IIRC) it was rather ambiguous and I did not have time to discuss it.   Anyway the transcription quality must have improved enormously since then, and the page distance I used probably was not ideal.   I think it would be better to redo it from scratch. You seem to have all the required boring parts programmed already...

All the best, --jorge

I wish we had the audio for this part of the talk:



On the folio ordering: in this plot, for example



the folia are sorted first by section and then by folio number. With this ordering, you can see that within Herbal some "general" topics appear, but they’re not neatly sequential, they pop in and out. My next step is to collect what’s known about the constraints on folio order (the quire structure constraints the order of its folia) and then try a few re-orderings to see whether the topics settle into a more coherent sequence. If anyone has this constraints information, it would help.

Note about my previous post: in this plot, there are general topics found in herbal section (the 6 topics are represented). But when I was talking about topics found only in herbal, I meant that I am not finding clear topics as I expected, only using the paragraphs of herbal section.