RE: Sad news about Stephen Bax
ReneZ > 24-11-2018, 07:58 AM
What Stephen tried to do was to interest people with an academic background in some relevant areas into the MS, and get them to contribute to a set of papers or presentations. I am not sure how successful he was with that.
I know it is a very challenging thing.
There is a very large 'disconnect' between academic and amateur interest in the Voynich MS. This is related to the relative importance that the MS has in these two circles, which is very different indeed. Given that the Beinecke already held a workshop dedicated to this single MS in 2014, it seems very unlikely that this will happen again soon, unless there is any kind of significant news. Any academic paper about the MS can appear in any number of existing journals, periodicals and symposia/workshops.
There is an almost complete lack of understanding between these two 'groups'.
If anything Voynich-dedicated is likely to happen in the not too distant future, I see this coming from the area of NLP (Natural Language Processing). It is still only happening in very incidental cases right now, but this is an area where significant, relevant progress is possible, that is not already covered by history and book academia.
There is nothing to stop the active bloggers and forum participants to meet up in some form or other. Nick has organised more or less regular informal meet-ups in London. A slightly larger event was held in 1998, without much need for large-scale preparation. Something like the 2012 Mondragone event takes a great deal of preparation, and an attempt to repeat it in 2014 failed for that reason.
Anyone thinking of doing something similar is welcome to go ahead, and I will be happy to provide advice.
Making it a proper symposium or workshop requires to set up an organising committee, invitations for contributions and criteria for accepting or rejecting such contributions. I think one can easily see how difficult that is going to be ...