Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

Consider the hypothesis 

  "in each page (with maybe a couple of exceptions), all parags have the same 'topic'".

Are your results compatible with this hypothesis?  In other words, how many pages did you find which have two or more parags with clearly distinct topics? 

If there are such pages, is the break between topics consistent with a transition between two "sections" that falls in the middle of a page?  That is,  do you see only transitions like [AA][AAA][AAB][BBB][BB][BAA][AA], or are there transitions like [AA][BA][BBB][BAB][AA] etc.?

I would not join labels to nearby parags.  Label distributions are quite different from parag word distributions.  If a page has two parags and you join a bunch of labels to the second parag, they will probably came out as having different topics, just for that reason.

All the best, --jorge

If I’m understanding you, that’s exactly what my plots show: I just didn’t explain them well (maybe they were only clear to me, sorry). The four plots contain the same data but are ordered differently. Each color is a topic. For each folio (think of a single vertical column), the vertical stack shows the proportions of topics on that folio. If a folio is a single color, all its paragraphs fall into the same topic; if it’s multicolored, different paragraphs are assigned to different topics.

In the first plot, folios are grouped by language (A/B) and, within each language, kept in manuscript order.

This lets you see how topics distribute within each grouping. For example, within language A the early folios are mostly the purple topic (with two small peaks of green topic); later there’s a small mix of orange, red, and lilac; towards the end of language A the green topic dominates. In language B there’s almost no purple or green, which matches the language split the model is picking up.

In the second, folios are grouped by section and, within each section, ordered as in the manuscript.


In the third, folios are grouped by Currier hand, again preserving manuscript order within each group.


In the fourth, folios are grouped by writing hand, also in manuscript order.