I picked up on this a few weeks ago, but thought that the combination of Google Translate and my screen-weary eyes was somehow deceiving me – for who on earth would be interested in going along to a week-long Voynich summer camp in a sparsely-furnished flat in Budapest [site in Hungarian]? The site had to be some kind of prop for an Hungarian RPG, surely?
However, it turns out that (despite the slightly jarring pen-name “Hartree-Fock Cares”) this is no joke, and is actually starting very shortly (Monday 24th August 2009). After I left a brief comment on the site just now, Miklos Vincze enthusiastically replied on behalf of the “organizing committee”:-
About the camp: This is an amateaur, self-organizing little summer school, with a few enthusiastic MA, MSc and Grad school students, and even postgrads – linguists, coders, physicists, who decided to spend a week with some research on this manuscript, just for the fun of it. For this purpose we rented a flat right in the middle of Budapest, which we will occupy permanently for a week, starting with the evening of August 24. We are planning to do some projects based mostly on word structures and on various properties of word distributions in the text. Also we would like to identify some of the plants as well, with the help of one of Hungary’s leading herbarists. I myself will try to expand Landini’s work on the autocorrelation patterns in the manuscript, and compare it with different types of medieval texts. And we will work on a plenty of projects like this in our little summer school.
Sadly, all the cheap EasyJet seats between London and Budapest were snapped up long ago, so it would be a bit pricy to fly over for the day (however tempting, particularly as I like Budapest so much): but I’ve offered to do one or two Instant Messaging Voynich Q&A sessions for them during the week, as that seems like a nice compromise. As Barry Norman used to say, “and why not?”
If any other Voynich experts reading this would like to donate an hour of their time for some similar IM-based Voynichological Q&A, I’m sure our Hungarian chums would be similarly delighted at the offer. Who knows, we might also even find some way of squeezing in some international Voynich IM’ing at the pub meet on Sunday. 🙂
While attending either the “Hungarian Voynich Study Group” meeting or the “Seven Stars of London” meeting sounds to be well worth attending — both are, sadly, beyond the reach of most.
Hopefully, both study sessions will be well documented and any significant ideas/results will be made available to us researchers unable to attend.
In any case — have a pint for me!
Though calling the London pub meet a “study session” might well be a bit of a stretch, I’ll certainly make sure the “having a pint for you” bit is fully covered. 🙂
Hi Nick! I passed this along to a Hungarian-born Voynichologist I know, as well as a Voynich correspondent in Prague, who said he unfortunately didn’t have time to attend.
Cheers,
Dennis
Thanks! I’m waiting for news back from Miklos on how/if things are going in Budapest, will post updates to the blog as/when/if they happen. 🙂