TTR Analysis, Observed vs. Reference Curve

[Torsten]

While experimenting with the type/token ratio in the VMS corpus, I compared the original curve with a smoothed ideal curve. With one exception, the curves are almost identical. The “kink” above the original curve can only mean that there are more new words than “usual” in this section of text. Since this deviation occurs only once, it is quite remarkable or am I overinterpreting this observation ?

Your observation is correct. See Timm 2014: "There are pages where words of a particular series are frequently used and pages where they are rare. Graph 1 also shows that the number of words which are part of the grid decreases for the pages from <f67r1> to <f73v>. These pages belong to the Cosmological section and to the section with Zodiac illustrations. Since the grid contains all words used at least four times, this means that more unique and rare words occur on these pages." (Timm 2014, p. 7f).