Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[MarcoP]

I wonder how/if Colin Layfield got around the scarcity of data problem. Restoring folio order based on a method similar to this sounds like it should be impossible, but from what we've seen in Lisa's talk, it looks like they may have gotten some useful results.

Hi Koen,
I think that measuring page distance based on word statistics could work: the fact that Voynichese shifts so much could even make the task easier, since differences in lexicon will tend to be considerable, and for each page I expect you only have very few other pages which are quite close. Also, they work on whole pages rather than paragraphs, and they might even consider whole folios (recto+verso) or bifolios. Of course, I expect there could be ambiguities and cases that are harder than average. Lisa's idea of also examining the stain provides a totally independent approach, and I am looking forward to seeing how the two methods interact.