Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[npcompl33t]

The point of my third figure is not the shape of the smudge, but its continuity and smoothness.  

That's fair, but ultimately the smoothness is a function of the granularity of data which doesn't exist with blocks of text like this. It is going to look chunky.

In order to claim that the points are best modeled as a "smoke trail" -- a compact prob distribution D(t) that depends on a gradually varying parameter t -- rather than a "cloud" or multiple "clouds", the density of points must change gradually along the curve C(t) of the centroid of that distribution.  Like in my figure #3.  Preferably in a bell-shaped fashion, with the density increasing and decreasing smoothly along the curve, with a single density peak around the middle of the curve. 

They do, both in the 2 dimensional mds1 vs mds2 and mds1 vs mds3 charts, but also in the full 256 dimensional space, which is what the curve shows. 

Moreover, we do not expect any text statistics to show a smooth consistent change from page to page, whether the pages are considered in chronological writing order, in intended reading order, or in the order which they were eventually bound.  Between sections, the statistical differences are expected to be dominated by the  change of topic and the changes of style that go with that.  Within most sections, we expect random variations around a single mean.  

You are absolutely correct, and that is why this deserves close attention, because it implies something about the txt we have been missing.

If you look at my post in the last page, i showed an example of this occurring in Napier's logbooks, for the exact reasons you would expect. He gradually changes the way he reports certain things over the course of multiple years.

If you You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , which i hope you will take a look at,  i show this gradual process exactly, with words specific word examples.

If you split the text into the sections i've identified, and treat them as a sequence, you will find that between any 2 nodes, there is a high degree of overlap, but that overlap decreases according to the number of steps, creating a gradient of word turnover from the start of the manuscript to the end.

This is exactly the Currier A->Currier B translation we have been discussing and that your previous work had suggested exists, it just happens over a series of steps, a gradient of cumulative changes.

The next step is to start to model these changes, similar to how linguists model phoneme changes. Once we establish the correspondence between all words, i think that things are going to develop quickly. I'm not saying that a solution will be found but I think this has been a significant confound in previous work. self citation vs evolution of the underlying script should present differently and we may be able to distinguish those.