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The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

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  • The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes
• The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

• The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

  Dunsel > 1 hour ago

  I decided to start another thread on this. While it ties directly into my work on the copy/mutate ledger (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), this deserves to be tied into my previous work on the bigram <ed> and to have it's own post because of the.... "Huh?" factor. This may already be known but I'm just discovering it so pardon if stepping on someone else's work.
  
  Here's my previous posts on that subject for reference.
  
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  In those posts I try to describe the differences between Currier A, which is Scribe 1 and Currier B which is Scribe 2+.  They are dominated by the difference between the bigrams <ho> and <ed> with I defined as ED0 and ED+ regimes.  My work on the generator focuses on Scribe 1 because of this apparent "regime shift" in order to try to gain stability in generator production.
  
  Today, I decided to explore that a little further to see what effects I would need to anticipate should I decide to model Scribe 2+ and here's the interesting results I got.
  
  First, I had codex create a basic machine learning script that would scan through the pages created by specific scribes (excluding any pages/sheets classified as being from 2 different scribes) and I had it look for syllabic chunks, things that resembled syllables.  After creating 5 data files, one for each scribe, I had codex create a second script that would combine and compare those results to see how different scribes used different chunks.  Here's the result:
  
  Both charts are sorted by Scribe 1 counts for comparison.
  
  Total count top chunks used by each scribe:
  
     
  
  Normalized count of top chunks used by each scribe:
  
     
  
  Here's my interpretation of what I'm seeing:
  
  To me, this looks cumulative and directional.  The later scribes are not replacing the earlier ecology, they are amplifying parts of it and reducing usage of other parts.
  
  And it's monotonic. Usage is consistently moving in one direction without reversing by scribe.
  
     
  
     
  
  Taking this method of ML chunking one step further, I had codex examine these syllables by quire and sheet and create a PCA chart (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).  In this chart, a dot represents a sheet. The number above the dot represents the quire number.
  
     
  
  Possible explanations for this because this does not look like random drift:
  

  • Source-pool inheritance: Different scribes may have preferentially copied from different quire/sheet pools, which matches my proposed sheet-source pool idea for page creation.  Furthermore, if pages were created using source sheets, the chunk ecology may suggest that later scribes preferentially reused sheets already created by earlier scribes and may have preferred the most recent scribe's work. (sorry, had to list this one first because of my working theory, not that it has any other specific weight.)
    
  • Regime reweighting: The scribes may have used slightly different weighting systems for selecting or constructing words while still operating within the same broader production framework.
    
  • Progressive stabilization: Over time, productive word families may have become increasingly dominant, with prefixes and endings becoming more specialized and certain chunks becoming structurally “sticky.”
    
  • Scribal training lineage: Later scribes may have learned from already-shifted exeamples. Scribe 5 inherits an ecology already shaped by Scribe 4, Scribe 4 inherits one shaped by Scribe 3, and so on.
    
  • Section/topic dependence: I have not specifically tested this yet, but different scribes are known to work in specific sections, so some chunk ecology differences could reflect section-specific production behavior rather than purely scribal differences.
    

  
  And there are certainly other plausible explanations as well. What I'm seeing though iis that the chunk ecology appears structured and directional rather than random.

• RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

  oshfdk > 59 minutes ago

  I don't think I understand what these graphs show. What is "Chunk Count" in the first graph, is it the total count per corpus for particular hand? Why do all five scribes have comparable overall chunk count?

• RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

  Dunsel > 32 minutes ago

  Basically, the ML script looked at the Voynich for each scribe.  It then tried to identify syllables, not just bigrams and trigrams. So you have a mixture of n-grams like <ch>, <co>, <che>, <aiin>.  Then it counted and weighted the occurrences of each of those n-grams (chunks) in each scribe's pages.  So, in the first 2 charts you have n-gram in the x axis and count in the y axis.
  
  The second set of charts takes specific n-grams that increase or decrease by scribe usage and plots those by count.  What that is showing is that specific n-gram usage is increasing or decreasing linearly by scribe.  Not random ups and downs, a smooth progression of n-gram usage.
  
  What I expected to see was some randomness as each of these scribes are generally section specific.  It's not. Their n-gram usage is linear.  What I'm seeing instead is that these n-grams increase or decrease based on the scribe and it's not like scribe 2 preferred <ch> more than scribe 5.  It's sequential.  Scribe 1 used <ch>.  Scribe 2 used it less.  Scribe 3 even less... etc.  
  
  I know you are no fan of the copy/mutate idea but imagine this:  Scribe 1 writes a page.  Scribe 2 gets that page and does a copy/mutate and in the process, uses some n-grams a little less, some a little more. Then Scribe 3 gets Scribe 2's page and they do a copy and mutate.  Because some n-grams are used less and some more, Scribe 3 amplifies this slightly.  Now those same n-grams are less or more on the Scribe 3 page than Scribe 2 or 1.  Now Scribe 4 gets that page and does a copy/mutate.... etc.
  
  I'm not saying that's definitely the explanation but I think it's one possible explanation.

• RE: The oddities of the bigram "ed" pt. 4 : The Chunking of Scribes

  oshfdk > 24 minutes ago

  Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think there are a lot of hand 1 pages in the manuscript, quite a number of hand 2 pages and only a few pages each for the rest of the scribes. The first graph appears to look as if the count of chunks is higher for scribe 5 than scribe 1. How is this possible?
  
  Edit: ok, you said "counted and weighted", now I see, however do these absolute values make any sense after counting and weighting?
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