[Article] [Article]: New article by Layfield & Davis

[magnesium]

Not really.  It is enough that the mapping from plaintext to Voynichese maps each word type to the the same word type or word types, in a sufficiently large fraction of the cases.  Like, for example, 70% of the daiin come from the plaintext word "herb", 70% of the Chedy come from "serpent", etc.  That would be enough to make two pages with the same topic have a higher-than-expected number of shared words.

But there is another problem with the idea of using word usage similarity to order the pages.  It may work for the Bio section, where a topic like "digestive system" may span several pages.  It is not expected to work on Herbal and Recipes, because each paragraph is likely to be an independent text, and we do not expect parags in adjacent pages to use more common words than parags in two distant pages.  

Thus, if one orders the pages by that criterion, one would get a seemingly continuous sequence, where word usage changes gradually along the sequence and is increasingly different as the pages gert further apart.  However, that gradient would be spurious, created by the ordering process itself.

As an analogy, suppose that one orders the books on a bookshelf by size.  The result will be a nice smooth gradient of sizes.   But of course that does not mean anything: we cannot infer that the books were printed in that order...

All the best, --stolfi

This is correct: ordering the pages by word usage similarity is not necessarily going to give you the original page ordering. Consider a novel like The Fifth Season or A Game of Thrones, where narrators and settings vary chapter by chapter. Grouping by word usage probably would have a better chance of grouping all chapters with the same narrator together than reconstructing the author's intended chapter order.

But in principle, an ordering based on word usage similarity could be treated as an input for other analytical techniques. For example, it's worth seeing how page- or folio-level trends in handwriting—perhaps average glyph sizes, average glyph proportions, or the presence/absence of specific glyph features—change across a given ordering independently of word usage. Maybe you could start to evaluate hypotheses on the compositional sequence of the bifolia.