Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[oshfdk]

UMAP is a way to turn complex data into a 2D picture so we can see patterns. In this case, each paragraph is first turned into a set of numbers (a vector) that describe how often different words appear together, sort of its fingerprint. Those fingerprints live in a huge mathematical space (maybe hundreds of dimensions).

I've only heard a bit about UMAP and never had chance to use it or understand what it does exactly, but some cursory reading on the internet suggest that UMAP tries to preserve topology of the underlying set and that its low dimensional axes are usually meaningless. Is this correct? I'm not sure how to interpret these graphs.