Torsten > 2 hours ago
Quote:In two recent companion papers, Layfield and Davis apply latent semantic analysis (LSA) to the Voynich Manuscript and derive two hypotheses: that the manuscript was conceived as a sequence of single-bifolium quires (“singulions”) later bound out of order, and that the intended sequence of bifolia can be recovered by maximizing textual similarity across page transitions. This review examines both hypotheses against the papers’ own published data. The empirical core of the first hypothesis, an elevated textual similarity within physical bifolia, is real and independently confirmed. The reading-order interpretation built upon it, however, is underdetermined by the data and contradicted by the authors’ own explanation of the herbal section. The second hypothesis rests on the premise that the intended order of a meaningful text maximizes lexical similarity between adjacent pages. This premise is refuted by the authors’ own calibration manuscripts, and the resequencing experiment lacks two controls that would make its reported improvements interpretable: a permutation null distribution and a calibration on deliberately shuffled known text. A similarity-based resequencing of the manuscript is nevertheless methodologically sound under one specific model of the text, namely that page-to-page similarity reflects proximity of production rather than continuity of meaning. Three concrete experiments, each executable with the authors’ existing pipeline, would discriminate between the competing interpretations.
Rafal > 26 minutes ago