• Options
• Login
• Desktop Style

The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

• Index

  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Analysis of the text
  • The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text
• The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

• RE: The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

  Rafal > 2 hours ago

  Quote:IIRC, you interpret the defining characteristics of Lisa Fagin Davis' scribal hands as reflecting changes in the writing of a supposed single creator over time.

  
  Torsten, if I may ask, do you need this assumption for something? Does it explain something to you? Or is it just a loose observation - you feel so but it's not really that important as nothing depends on it.
  
  Personally I am close to gibberish hypothesis but at the same time accept multiple scribes.
  
  I have never got deep into Currier A vs Currier B thing but I believe others who say that there are Currier A pages, Currier B pages and in-between pages.
  
  I can see a simple explanation for that.
  There is some system used by scribes to create gibberish but leaving some freedom to them. They have their personal style. Scribe 1 writes in Currier A, Scribe 2 writes in Currier B.
  
  Then one day a conversation happens:
  
  Scribe 1: Man, I hate my job. So tired of inventing these crappy words that don't mean anything. Cheating people. I would really rather be a peasant ploughing a field or a beggar sitting at the church entrance.
  
  Scribe 2: Hey, a bad day may happen to everyone. You want to look at my page? You could borrow some words from it. Get some inspiration
  
  Scribe 1: Thanks buddy! 
  
  This way Scribe 1 could include some words typical to Scribe 2 but never fully changed his style. It resulted in intermediate pages.

• RE: The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

  JoJo_Jost > 1 hour ago

  Indeed, if the text were written phonetically (not unusual for the 15th century) and two different scribes (e.g. Bairish from two different villages) spoke slightly different dialects, certain differences would emerge. I cannot say whether this would be reflected in this results, but it would at least be conceivable.

• RE: The Challenge of Analyzing a Dynamic Text

  Torsten > 15 minutes ago

  (4 hours ago)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.IIRC, you interpret the defining characteristics of Lisa Fagin Davis' scribal hands as reflecting changes in the writing of a supposed single creator over time. 

  
  I don't do that. See my paper discussing Lisa Fagin Davis scribal hands: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
  
  

  (4 hours ago)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree fully that the Herbal B dialect is a massive problem for efforts to attribute substantial differences in dialect vocabularies to nothing more than topical differences in the sections. To the extent that I remain agnostic at best about spaces being word separators I share your skepticism about what applying topic modeling is actually measuring in the text. 
  
  It's unfortunate there is no preprint of the Yale work Lisa described in a recent talk to refer to for more detail, but if I understand correctly what they are seeing in their Latent Semantic Analysis results is the same type of transition page-to-page in the Starred paragraph section that is found in texts where there is a narrative/argumentative arc (or that you expect it to show from the self-citation method), but they are not seeing that behavior in the herbal section pages (or in the similar genre texts they used as comparisons). Which is not surprising because there is no sustained narrative flow in something like an herbal or bestiary, it's just discrete descriptions of X, Y, & Z one after another. If that's the case, then that requires explanation in the context of the self-citation method -- why should the LSA results differ between the sections?
  
  I remain unconvinced that the various dialects relect a smooth transition of a single process over time as opposed to discrete distributions with some degree of overlap in their tails, but I'll take a closer look at the material in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. link you provided.

  
  For my analysis see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
  
  Or see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:
  

  Quote:Interpreting normal texts as bit sequences yields deviations of little significance from a true (uncorrelated)
  random walk. For the VMS, this only holds on a small scale of approximately the average line length; beyond positive correlation build up: the presence/absence of a symbol appears to increase/decrease the tendency towards another occurrence

  
  See also my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from 2024 where I discuss the distribution of EVA-m:
  

  Quote:This means that changes in bigram frequencies are quite normal for the Voynich text. Therefore other criteria would allow to partition the Voynich text further. For instance EVA-m could be used to distinguish between Currier-A folios with EVA-m (bifolio 3/6, bifolio 17/24 ...) and Currier-A folios without EVA-m (bifolio 2/7, bifolio 10/15, bifolio 20/21, f25r/f25v, ...)  Or to distinguish between folios with EVA-m in line final position (Currier B) and folios without a preference for a certain line position (Currier-A).

• Next Oldest Next Newest