Review of “People of the Book”…

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Geraldine Brooks’ novel “The People of the Book” (2008) tells the story of a (fictional) Australian book conservator called Hanna Heath, and her encounters with a (real) codex called the Sarajevo Haggadah. In this sense, it is very much akin to the Voynich Manuscript novels I review here, which typically use the mystery of the VMs as a projective backdrop for their quasi-historical stories of life, death, passion and (occasionally) beauty, plucking the occasional codicological thread from our collective skein of Voynichological ignorance to frouf up into a faux Restoration wig.

One page in particular is returned to again and again: I wished this had been on the book cover so that I could see for myself what the fuss was about. Well, here it is, book fans (and there are plenty more on this Talmud site, and on this facsimile publishing site here):-

haggadah_seder_small
Sarajevo Haggadah – family seder illustration

Brooks has given her book a formal, almost musical structure: chapters set in Hanna’s present day ping-pong with chapters recounting enjoyable storylets of the Sarajevo Haggadah’s (imagined) past, each evoked by a single codicological detail – an insect’s wing (Parnassius mnemosyne leonhardiana, just so you know), a missing clasp, wine stains, saltwater, a single white hair. In each case, the life and atmosphere of a particular historical Jewish community is nicely evoked: and there are plenty of little structural surprises scattered throughout to keep a sense of movement in the narrative.

haggadah-marginalia-small
Sarajevo Haggadah marginalia from Venice, 1609

In one important sense, the point of the novel is that it tries to draw a parallel between (a) the process of trying to get to know the past of an object, and (b) the process of trying to get to know oneself: this is, after all, what history (as a tool) is for. Yet despite aiming her bow in such a noble direction, Brooks doesn’t quite hit the bullseye: though her protagonist finally uncovers the secret lives both of the haggadah (just as I’ve said with the VMs, incandescent lighting rocks) and of her family, she remains fundamentally the same shallow, dissatisfied shagette we met in the first chapter.

Yet in other ways, the real meat of the novel is in Brooks’ account of the codicology, based in part on observing real-life Austrian book restorer Andrea Pataki working with the actual Sarajevo Haggadah in December 2001. Brooks’ description of the texture and sheer tactility of an up-close (but slow-motion) encounter with a ancient manuscript is both detailed and (in my experience, at least) highly evocative of how this kind of thing actually does play out in reality. If you won’t ever get to touch a real-life manuscript yourself, maybe reading “The People of the Book” isn’t such a bad alternative. 🙂

Look, I enjoyed it and I hope it does well for Brooks: with “The Reader” doing so well at the cinema, I can quite imagine this being picked up  (doubtless Kate Winslet could do a bonza Ozzie accent). Yet whereas The Reader was about hiding illiteracy, Brooks’ book is more about uncovering literacy, using codicology to imaginatively reconstruct the lives of the people behind this amazing book. As such, I can only applaud.

Voynich Ms Reading List Recommendations…?

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In a comment to a recent post on Alberti & Averlino, ‘infinitii’ asks what my recommendations would be for a Voynich Manuscript reading list… a deceptively hard question.

Apart from the direct literature on the subject (Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”, my “The Curse of the Voynich”, and perhaps even Kennedy & Churchill’s “The Voynich Manuscript”), probably the best first step would always be to buy yourself a copy of “Le Code Voynich” – not for its prolix French introduction *sigh*, but simply so that you can look at the VMs’ pages in colour. The best guide to the manuscript still remains the evidence of your own eyes. 🙂

All of which is the easy, lazy blogger answer: but the kind of proper answer infinitii alludes to would be much, much harder. I should declare here that the VMs’ life in Bohemia (and beyond) strikes me as merely a footnote to the main story (though admittedly one that has been interminably expanded, mainly for lack of proper research focus).. Given that I’m convinced (a) 1450 is pretty close, date-wise; (b) Northern Italy is pretty close, location-wise; and (c) it’s almost certainly some kind of enciphered book of secrets, then the main subject we should be reading up on is simply Quattrocento books of secrets.

Doubtless there are three or four literature trees on this that I’m completely unaware of (please tell me!): but as a high level starting point, I’d recommend Part One (the first 90 pages, though really only the last few touch on the 15th century) of William Eamon’s “Science and the Secrets of Nature” (1994). Unfortunately for us, Eamon’s main interest is in Renaissance printed books of secrets. “In Nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read” (Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra), indeed. 🙂

From there, you’ll probably have to drill down (as I did) to individual studies of single books. Virtually everything written by Prager and Scaglia fits this bill, such as  their “Brunelleschi: Studies of His Technology and Inventions” (1970) and “Mariano Taccola and His Book De Ingeneis” (1972). I recently blogged about Battisti and Battisti’s splendid “Le Macchine Cifrate di Giovanni Fontana” (1984), and that is also definitely one to look at (though being able to read Italian tolerably well would be a distinct help there). I’ve also read articles by Patrizia Catellani on Caterina Sforza’s “Gli Experimenti” (which has a smattering of cipher in its recipes), and read up on the possible origins of Isabella Cortese’s supposed “I Secreti” (which is about as late as I’ve gone). Beyond that, you’re pretty much on your own (sorry).

As general background for what secrets such books might contain, I can yet again (though I know that infinitii will groan) only really point to Lynn Thorndike’s sprawling (but wonderful) “History of Magic & Experimental Science” (particularly Volumes III and IV on the 14th and 15th century), and his little-read “Science and Thought in the XVth Century”. Thorndike’s epic books stand proud in the middle of a largely desolate research plain, somewhat like Kubrick’s black monoliths: if anything else comes close to them, I don’t know of it.

As far as Quattrocento cryptography goes, David Kahn’s “The Codebreakers” is (despite its size) no more than an apéritif to a book that has yet to be written. I found Paolo Preto’s “I Servizi Segreti” very helpful, though limited in scope. For Leon Battista Alberti’s cryptography, Augusto Buonafalce’s exemplary modern translation of “De Cifris” is absolutely essential.

What is missing? There are a few relevant books I’ve been meaning to source but haven’t yet got round to, most notably the century-old (but possibly never surpassed) “Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Inventions & Books of Secrets” by John Ferguson. You can buy an updated version with an index and a preface by William Eamon, for example from here.

In many ways the above is no more than a very personal selection of books, and one obviously based around my own particular research programme / priorities. Yet even though I have tried to cover the ground reasonably well over the last few years, there are doubtless large clusters of (for example Italian-language) papers, books and particularly dissertations I am completely unaware of.

It should be clear that I think the basic research challenge here is to build up a properly modern bibliography of Quattrocento books of secrets, and thereby to map out the larger literature field within which the whole idea of ‘the VMs as an enciphered book of secrets’ can be properly placed. Perhaps I should use this as a test case for open source history?

New Beale Papers Theory…

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Word arrives at Mysteries Mansion from “Fred Jones / Will Smith” about his/her shiny new Beale Papers theory: “Yes the codes are broken! I am giving them out free for all to see at http://www.bealetreasurecodes.com ”

As everyone knows, Part 2 was decoded in the original 1885 pamphlet (though the precise details of how the decoder silently worked past where the encoder misnumbered the words in the Declaration of Independence text have caused a fair few modern cryptologists to suspect the whole thing might be some kind of hoax): but what of Parts 1 and 3? You know, the bits that say where the treasure is hidden. 🙂

If you hack through all the foliage (Jefferson? Templars? What?), Jones/Smith’s claim is that if you apply a modified part of the plaintext of Part 2 to the first few lines of Part 1 (so that “71, 194, 38, 1701, 89, 76, 11, …” maps to “INTHECOUNTYOFBEDFORDABOUTFOURMILESAQUADRANTAWAYFROMBUFORD” you get some kind of cunning mix of French and English fragments in the remainder, which (once he’s filled in the gaps) he claims reads as follows:-

In the county of bedford about four miles a quadrant away from buford then here by ahan need ban o tug de a tac foam ruth ci in en but heath narrow mount tut by aire aid t blockade utterly the lentuer stagnation defunt having hag note aerial sa middle ninth bar …

Ohhhhkayyyy… it’s at this point I throw my hands up in the air and simply point out that this looks not entirely dissimilar to Levitov’s VMs descryption (and, though GC will disagree, to Leonell Strong’s claimed VMs decryption too) – a kind of polyglot mishmash of language-like fragments, not unlike hurling a bowl’s worth of Alphabetti Spaghetti at a wall and trying to piece together the resultant letter gloop into sentence-like things. Oh well…

Smith/Jones has put up two (quite big) pages already with more planned over the next few days/weeks: perhaps he/she will have plenty of surprises for us for Part 3. We shall see!

The Voynich “Apollo” sun…

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Edith Sherwood recently flagged the “sun-face” at the middle of f68v1 as being a representation of Apollo, and that this “could indicate an association with Roman mythology“. Certainly, the face is tilted slightly upward and is linked with the sun, both features you might (naively, iconologically) expect to point to Apollo. If only Voynich research was that simple! Let’s start by taking a look at the sun-face in context, in particular the paints….

f68v1-highlighted

Here, the red-coloured contact transfer (from f69r) at the bottom left clearly happened after the pages were rebound in the wrong order [f68v1’s “sun-face” initially sat beside f67r1’s “moon-face”], bringing to my mind the bloodstain imagined on the Sarajevo Haggadah by Geraldine Brooks in her novel “People of the Book” (which I’ll review here shortly). There are also “blue-edge” paint transfers (also from f69r) at 11.30, 12.00, 3.00, and 3.30, as well as some contact-transferred green “pipe-ends” at 10.30, 11, and 1 o’clock.

Given that the dirty black-blue paint on f68v1 appears to be identical to the one used on f69r, it seems extremely likely to me that the blue and green paints on both pages were later additions, whereas f68v1’s far paler yellow paint (which is covered over by the blue in a number of places) gives the distinct impression of being original. The ‘alpha’ (i.e. original) state of the page was therefore very likely to be just the drawings and the yellow paint only. If you snip away all the distracting blue paint in a a picture editor, you’d get something like this:-

sun-face-alpha

With all the distracting blue paint removed, we can start to see more clearly what was being drawn. For instance, we can see the lines marking the front and back of the neck: and once we see those, we can see the wobbly line marking the back of the head (inside the circle). However, this appears to me to go over the dotted “headband” – and so the headband was apparently drawn first.

There is also a curious small loop where the head’s left ear would be, partially disguised by the rays, which I find reminiscent of the kind of stubby metal loops you see on astrolabes.

I therefore argue that this codicological evidence suggests that the alpha state of the image was probably a circle with a dotted arc that has been made to look as though it is a headband (when a face was added) – and so I would say that any resemblance to Apollo is very probably incidental to the real meaning of the page.

Dotted lines seem to have a particular resonance for the VMs’ author in several other places, and I have long suggested that these might very well indicate that meaningful information has been visually encoded. My guess here is that this was the briefest of sketches to allude to some kind of 15th century solar instrument – not an astrolabe, but something broadly similar.

To me, all this exemplifies the problem with looking for iconographic matches on the VMs’ sleek surface: in most cases, the basic codicological study (that ought to precede any searching for meaning) seems not to have been done – far too often, people skip to the chase without really looking at the page first.

Oh well! 😮

Wall-E and the Voynich Manuscript…

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Last weekend, it was too cold to go swimming without an ice-pick, so I took my young son to see the Disney Pixar film “Wall-E” (he already had the matching underpants, so what the hey). The cinema presentation was preceded by an interminably long advert for Butlins holiday camps: I found this rather amusing given that (in the film) the people on the spaceship Axiom have spent 700 years laying around a lido sipping drinks while their bones shorten and their muscles atrophy. Kewl.

But anyway, is there any link between Wall-E and the Voynich Manuscript?, I hear you yell. Put down those tomatoes, I’m gettin’ to it, I’m gettin’ to it… There are plenty of ways of reading Pixar’s (actually rather good) film, from a moralistic eco-parable (which some games-industry friends of mine find hilarious, given that they did the programming for a WALL-E plastic toy), to “Robots In Love” (my personal favourite). But given that little WALL-E has amused himself (possibly for centuries?) by kicking off his caterpillar treads at the end of each working day and watching a fading VHS video of Michael Crawford in “Hello Dolly!”, the film is arguably more about a kind of romantic musical cargo cult – how obsessive devotion to a single cultural object taken out of context can produce jarringly odd behaviour.

In those terms, perhaps all traditional Voynich researchers are Wall-E, holed up after work in their suburban dens, overcompensating for existential emptiness with devotion to a practically non-existent cause, where their hunt for meaning in the (also nearly 600-year-old!) Voynich Manuscript is broadly as far-fetched a cargo cult as Wall-E’s hunt for robotic musical love within the reference frame of “Hello Dolly!”

At least humour me, and say that you can see the romance in both quests. 🙂

New Leonardo + Voynich Ms + Tarot article…

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Edith Sherwood, everyone’s favourite Leonardo-wrote-the-Voynich-so-he-did theorist, has posted up an extensive (and fascinating) new article focusing mainly on the depictions of the sun, moon and stars in the Voynich Manuscript: the starting point of her journey is the striking similarity between suns and moons in the VMs’ “astronomical” Quire 9 and a sun/moon pair on a particular Afro-Portuguese ivory horn (#101) carved between 1495 and 1521. Essentially, the question she tries to tackle is: what on earth connects these two very disparate objects?

afro-portuguese-horn-101Afro-Portuguese Horn #101 (from Edith Sherwood’s site)

Unsurprisingly, she starts by linking the sun with the Visconti raza symbol (as per p.61 of my “The Curse of the Voynich”): but, even better, continues by connecting the sun/moon pair to two copies of Dante’s Commedia, as posted up by long-time Tarot researcher Robert V. O’Neill in Chapter 14 of his online article “Dante’s Commedia and the Tarot”.  O’Neill suggests connections between the Commedia manuscript illustrations (Sherwood describes these as 14th century “woodcuts”, probably a typo) and the designs found on early Tarot cards, in particular his Figure 37 (“late 14th century”) and Figure 39 (“mid 14th century”), though unfortunately he doesn’t give MS references for them. To all of which I would also add the probable connection between the circular arrays of VMs zodiac nymphs and Dante’s description of concentric rows of angels in Heaven (as per pp.36-37 of “The Curse”).

At first glance, Sherwood’s proposed iconographic connection between the Visconti-Sforza Tarot sun/moon, the carved ivory sun/moon, and the VMs sun/moon (essentially, though the carved ivory and the VMs were unlikely to be directly connected, they both had the Visconti-Sforza Tarot as a shared ancestor) seems perfectly reasonable. In fact, it almost amounts to an excellent example of the kind of “Voynich Research 2.0” 14th-century-centred art history I blogged about recently.

commedia-links

The problem with this is that it presupposes  a circa 1500 (basically, Leonardo-friendly) date for the VMs, without noting that there is an alternative  (and, given the 15th century quire numbers, I would say more likely) diffusion sequence that doesn’t rely on the Tarot at all. Remember, the similarities noted were between the VMs and the Commedia illustrations, not the Visconti-Sforza Tarot per se:-

commedia-links-v2

In her article, Edith Sherwood also makes a number of other fascinating observations and comparisons (to do with Apollo, with the water nymphs, and with the parallel hatching) which I’d really like to blog about in more detail, but quite frankly those will have to wait for another day.

Finally, Leonardo was anything but a child when he reached Milan in 1481 (when Sherwood suggests he probably first saw the Tarot), so her parallel claim that Leonardo can only have made the VMs as a (brilliant) child doesn’t really seem to stack up with her proposed Tarot connection anyway.

If you look at the VMs with truly open art historical eyes (as Sherwood set out to do), I think you will almost inevitably reach a certain position: it’s mid-Quattrocento Northern Italian, with its cryptographic roots in Milan, its intellectual roots in Florence, its stylistic roots in Venice, and its philosophical roots in Dante. Oh, and it was written by a secrets-obsessed right-hander with a far greater command of cryptography than Leonardo da Vinci ever had (Chapter 6 of “The Curse” has a detailed critique of Leonardo’s limited cryptography).

PS: I found Sherwood’s article through Google Adwords “Voynich written by a lefty?“: but if you want me to look at your Voynich site, please just email a link to me, it’s much cheaper (and quicker). 🙂

German zodiac woodcuts…?

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My last post on Elmar Vogt’s new blog received a comment from infinitii, asking me for the source for the suggestion that the zodiac motifs may have been copied from a (possibly 14th century) German woodcut calendar. I had long forgotten the story’s origin, but a quick grep through the VMs mailing list archives (the ones before 2002 that aren’t yet on the web) turned up what seems to be the key thread.

Jorge Stolfi began (29Dec2000):-

In the meantime, I remembered I had seen something like the VMS Sagittarius somewhere in the astrological books. And I have found it on the Web – have a look at:

  http://www.englib.cornell.edu/mhh4/planets/jupiter.html

This is from an early (15th c.) German “Planets’ Children” blockbooks (the planets’ children theme was also found in some of the Books of Hours – eg. the most beautiful one of Duc de Berry). The crossbow man looks *very much* like the VMS Sagittarius to me. Also note that the actual Sagittarius in a small circle at the feet of Jupiter above is represented as a man – not a traditional centaur (even though he holds a standard bow).

I think this confirms the 15th c. German origin as stated by Panofsky (a great authority, after all) – at least until a better argument is put forward (I am not convinced by the humanist hand argument and still less by the other Italian origin arguments recently presented by Dana – people were coming to study in Italy from all over Europe and thus
were heavily influenced by Renaissance culture and art).

Rene Zandbergen then replied (30Dec2000) to the last two paragraphs:-

Yes, very ‘block book’ and very German. In Saxl’s ‘Verzeichniss’ other nice examples can be seen.

I’m not yet ready to decide. Is the theme German and the execution Italian? Or in the block book, where the execution is German, the theme of the planets’ children was widespread. The profusely illustrated but otherwise only moderately useful book ‘Alchemie & Mystik’ by Alexander Roob gives a lot of nice examples.

Jorge Stolfi continued (30Dec2000):-

What I meant is that the crossbow man really looks like the VMS Sagittarius and that I have not seen that sign represented by a man rather than a centaur elsewhere. Are there any examples of non-German non-centaur Sagittarius?

Rene Zandbergen responded (30Dec2000):-

He does indeed. I found out I have copies of some illustrations from the same block book (in German) but these are not including Sagittarius.

Certainly, there are German Sagitarii which _are_ centaurs, but that doesn’t really help. I’ll scan a few nice images from a book called ‘Flores Albumasaris’ printed in Augsburg around 1480. They’re woodcuts but allow a nice comparison with some of the VMs images. Sagittarius is a Centaur here.

Then there’s a brief lull, until Rafal Prinke continues the thread (09 Jan 2001) with a number of closely related art historical bombshells:-

I have received a very kind and informative reply from Prof. Ewa Sniezynska-Stolot of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (my repeated apologies to the list I had not written to her earlier). Below is a translation/summary of her letter.

——————————–

I have inspected the VMS at Beinecke. The signs of the Zodiac do not present problems – they are simply not of the Arateia type but were modernized. As I wrote in my books, because of linguistic mistakes and changes in artistic styles, human figures were represented in contemporary garments (viz. Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius). Attributes were changed in the same way, eg. Sagittarius’ bow developed into a crossbow in the 15th c.

The genre scenes, eg. Aries eating a bush, suggest that the signs were redrawn from a calendar. Garments: the jopulas [?] of men with a belt suggest the 14th/15th c. but headdresses of men (Gemini, Sagittarius) definitively indicate the 15th c. This was common fashion in Europe at that time. The Sagittarius’ cap with fox tail points to Germany – but they were also worn in Poland. I believe that the manuscript can be dated
to mid-15th c. From the astrological iconography point of view, the Taurus at a well is somewhat strange – unless an image of donkeys was a basis for it and then it would refer
to Cancer – but that is certainly going too far.

In my opinion it is a notebook of a liberal arts student. Similar notebooks are Beinecke 225 and 226. The former belonged to Paul de Worczin who studied in Cracow in 1422
(according to the Beinecke catalogue Cracow is in Bohemia!). The latter is also from Cracow.

In our Institute we have a database with descriptions of most of existing medieval zodiacal iconography. I am now preparing a similar database of the iconography of
individual degrees of the Zodiac.

————————————–

Thus she confirms the opinion of Panofsky (and my own amateurish feeling) that the VMS should be dated to mid-15th Germany/Poland/Bohemia.

The suggestion that it is a student’s notebook is a bit of a revelation to me! Drawing naked ladies and fantastic pipelines during boring lectures is perhaps what they were doing from the dawn of time.

Prof. Sniezynska-Stolot has not addressed the VMS script but I hope to keep in contact with her. Maybe that was some kind of a medieval “beta-kappa” students’ corporation fun popular in Cracow and there are loads of similar manuscripts at the Jagiellonian Library?

Here’s a picture of a [modern] jopula (no, I didn’t know what it was either): basically, it’s a 14th/15th century outer garment made of four pieces plus sleeves, something like a doublet. Looks quite snug! 🙂

Rene Zandbergen picked up on the Sagittarius crossbowman’s hat’s fox tails (11Jan2001):-

Brumbaugh always made a point of stressing that this was a Florentine archer’s hat. Guess in whose opinion I put more trust.

Rafal Prinke then made a related calendaric aside (13Jan2001):

There were 3 styles of beginning the year in March:

1) Venetian – 1st March
2) Florentine and Pisan – 25th March (with a year’s difference)
3) Gallic – Easter Sunday (ie. not always in March)

The Venetian style was also used in Ruthenia (but not in Poland, which used exclusively Christmas and 1st January, along with Germany, Bohemia and Sweden). Russia changed to the Byzantine style in 1492 (1st September), also used in other Orthodox countries and in southern Italy.

The Florentine style was used in England, while the Gallic style – in France and the Netherlands.

So – if we accept the calendaric basis for the VMS Zodiac, it points either to Venice (and thus Northern Italy, which is the favoured hypothesis now) or pre-1492 Ruthenia, which might suggest further possibilities of a connection with Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Armenian or Turkish influences on the VMS script and content.

Incidentally, I should also flag this as a good example of how a single small thread in the VMs mailing circa 2000 typically contained more effort, historical research, genuine collaboration and reflective thought than entire months of postings there do now. People sometimes think that I’m perhaps being nostalgic or unrealistic when I talk of the decline of the list: but sadly it’s a very real phenomenon.

Elmar Vogt’s new Voynich blog…

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Apart from Cipher Mysteries, the Voynich blogosphere has been far too quiet of late. Even Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Das Voynich Blog” is, despite some intriguing posts in the past, fairly subdued.

And so it is a breath of fresh air to see a new blog from an old friend: long-time Voynich mailing list member Elmar Vogt has recently started up his Voynich Thoughts blog. Elmar has already posted a whole heap of nice snippets, such as the German Wikipedia entry’s comparison of the plant on f56r with drosera intermedia (which I mentioned here and here), a nice comparison of the Sagittarius archer with a drawing in a 15th century woodcut, as well as a circa-1450 head-dress comparison with a zodiac nymph.

Part of me really wants him to put these fragments into context – for the Sagittarius page, for example, how it was suggested long ago that the zodiac motifs might well have largely been copied from a (probably 14th century?) German woodcut calendar; a discussion of the Sagittarius archer’s (probably 14th century and fairly rustic) crossbow; plus a wider comparison of the crossbowman’s headwear with (say) the 15th century “turban” / chaperon as depicted by Robert Campin and Van Eyck.

Yet another part of me simply wants Elmar to fill his blog with that thing he does so very well – which is to use his keen logical eye and pleasantly acid German wit to be entertainingly tart about Voynichological nonsense. Wherever contemporary haruspicators pop up to read their imagined stories into the VMs’ well-scanned entrails, I’ll always be delighted to read Elmar’s commentary.

Trivia time: it’s no great secret that software developer Elmar has long contributed text edits to Wikipedia (such as its VMs page) under the monicker “Syzygy“: but what is perhaps less known is that, as a fan of the Atari ST, he chose this as a homage to the company Atari – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney used “Syzygy Engineering” for their original company name.

Hmmm… I’m not sure he’d be much impressed by the two computer games I wrote for the ST: 3D Pool and Loopz. Oh well!  🙂

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Pub Quiz Team…

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One hugely influential piece of modern writing is Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“:the central metaphor contrasts huge, monolithic, closed-source software developments (i.e. “the Cathedral”) with agile, distributed, open-source software developments (i.e. “the Bazaar”).

Raymond’s metaphor is just a metaphor: but all the same, there are plenty of none-too-subtle quasi-religious overtones at play here, which tend to colour the whole argument in favour of the Bazaar (which is his point, basically).

In the spirit of Raymond’s Bazaar, I’ve been wondering for a while whether I could (effectively) open-source my history research. Because I’m not a tenured academic, I don’t need a steady stream of refereed papers to justify my position to a departmental head: my interest in (for example) the Voynich Manuscript is more or less entirely about scratching an historical itch. And so “going open source” is something that is actually feasible, even if the precise (technological) details of quite how to achieve this are as yet unclear.

What I have in mind would be broadly in the same vein as the Voynich “challenges” page I put up a few years ago, only 10x times more focused. This would take the form of an ever-evolving page of open research challenges, each with references to (and summaries of) any relevant papers and books, and with (here it gets a bit vague) contact details for other researchers looking at the same problem and/or some kind of online forum for discussing each challenge.

Essentially, Eric Raymond’s central claim is that if you raise a daring enough flag, people will follow it: and as I think there are compelling arguments for tackling each of the research challenges I have in mind, this seems like a good fit. However, I find Raymond’s “Bazaar” troubling, as it seems to me to be based on a kind of free-market wheeler-dealer economics model, whereby each of the entities functions independently… as if competitive market trading will always provide an optimal solution to any problem. Applying this kind of superficial economics cant to software development (or even to historical research) is largely nonsensical: it’s just a metaphor, there is no “market” per se to regulate. Besides, as the key problems in large-scale software development are mainly to do with collaboration rather than competition, there’s good reason to think that the Bazaar is a flawed metaphor.

In the real world, I suspect that the actual model opposing The Cathedral is (sadly) far too often instead The Pub Quiz Team – a near-random group of people hoping to work as a team, but only occasionally gelling in anything approaching a purposeful way. And I say this having last night been on a Berrylands pub quiz team that came last by a mile – unsurprisingly, I don’t like pub quizzes much.

Applying this idea to the main Voynich mailing list, what has unfortunately happened over the last five years is that it has somehow turned from something surprisingly close to Eric Raymond’s idealized Bazaar (lots of individual researchers doing their thing within an overall research programme, trading ideas rather than punches) to a bickering pub quiz team, which can’t even agree its team name, let alone the answers to any of the questions.

In just about every important way, then, the VMs mailing list (in its present form) encapsulates more or less all of the things I would like to avoid in an open-source collaborative history project. As with most enterprises, knowing what to avoid is a reasonable starting point, but bear with me while I try to work out those pesky details…

“Knowledge of the Flesh”

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Here’s something I’d really love to attend: as part of the upcoming annual meeting of The Bibliographical Society of America at The Grolier Club on Friday 23 January 2009, some papers from the BSA’s New Scholars Program are being presented, one of which is by Timothy L. Stinson (from North Carolina State University) and called “Knowledge of the Flesh: Using DNA Analysis to Unlock Bibliographical Secrets of Medieval Parchment“. Having said that, I might be able to save you the fare to New York: here’s a link to an article that summarizes what Timothy Stinson is doing – basically, he is trying to use vellum DNA as a tool for localising individual manuscripts (rather than have to rely on anything so wobbly & interpretative as palaeography)… once he’s built up a large enough corpus of DNA samples.

This is not hugely far from something I have long thought about (for the Voynich Manuscript). I suspect that DNA comparison of the material used in its bifolios could yield a solid first step towards the original page-order, by reconstructing the likely original quire groupings (there is no obvious reason to think that its quires would have been constructed in anything apart from the conventional manner). Back in 2006, I also used matching skin flaws (along the spine) to predict how one of the original quires was cut from an animal skin – it would fascinating to have a parallel DNA data track to compare this kind of analysis with.

In short, while Stinson is interested in inter-textual DNA comparisons, I’m interested in intra-textual DNA comparisons. However, even though the latter might be the kind of techy humanities project you’d half-expect to pop up somewhere like the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, I don’t actually think it will happen any time soon. Unless you know better…?

Update: Bill Walsh sent in a link to a nice National Geographic story with more technical detail on Stinson’s DNA research. Thanks, Bill – neat! 🙂 And here’s another one from SciAm.