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.

Enciphered diaries…

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Here’s a nice little blog entry on Rick Smith’s Cryptosmith blog, talking about encrypted documents (rather than just encrypted messages), specifically the enciphered diaries of Charles Wesley (who co-founded the Methodist Church) and of Beatrix Potter.

The 2008 BBC article Rick links to also discusses a war diary made by RAF prisoner of war Donald Hill, and an as-yet-not-fully-decrypted shorthand diary kept by Lord Hailsham. If you want some juicy modern stuff to decipher, the Margaret Thatcher Foundation is looking for cryptological volunteers to decipher more of Lord Hailsham’s notes – there’s even an Excel spreadsheet there with words they’ve cracked so far. Hmmm… sounds like a job for the tireless Tony Gaffney. 😉

For the Beatrix Potter movie website Rick Smith linked to (discussing her diaries), the Second Law of Web Thermodynamics has unfortunately kicked in (“the fancier the website, the sooner it dies“). However, here’s what the Wayback Machine has recorded for it:-

Beatrix Potter’s diary is a true insight into her life. Written in code with the belief that it would never be read, the only surviving entries date from 1881 to 1897. At times she corresponds with a girl called Esther – an imaginary person in Beatrix’s life which perhaps points towards the inevitable moments of loneliness she must have felt, particularly whilst Bertram, her brother, was away at school.

Her diary takes us into her world and she writes not only of her day to day life – family visits, trips to art galleries and exhibitions, but also the turbulent side of the wider world – riots, mobs, murders and political and social upheaval.

It was not until 20 years after Beatrix’s death that the diary code was cracked by the tireless work of Leslie Linder. On Easter Monday 1958, through recognition of a date mentioned and a little more research the first word was deciphered – ‘execution’. This word marked the beginning of the enlightenment and Leslie eventually worked out the code, deciphering the symbols bit by bit.

History Today Awards 2009…

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Summoned to the Tower of London for wine & canapés? Do you honestly think I could refuse?

Every year, the History Today Awards organizers find ever more inspiring/imposing historical venues to give out a small set of prizes (best undergraduate dissertation, best historical book, best picture editing in a book, and this year’s special award for “best vaguely historical person called Simon Jenkins who we happen to like very much“): but how they plan to top the fog-enrobed theatricality of the Tower of London for their 2010 shindig I don’t really know. Buckingham Palace? Windsor Castle? Aboard the Mary Rose? 😉

Of course, the real point of such events is to meet a whole succession of nice & interesting people in and around the general History sphere, such as Terka Acton from Thames & Hudson and James Bellini (AKA The Historian of the Future), etc and perhaps get mildly drunk with them. And so at 9pm a good proportion of the attendees decamped from the Tower to the Wetherspoons just opposite, where I got to chat with the small (though perfectly formed) History Today team, particularly Paul Lay (the new editor) and Sheila Corr (who did such a splendid job on the pictures for my telescope article), as well as with other recent History Today contributors such as the Royal Holloway’s Daniel Beer (and his über-engaging partner Katya).

The only downer of the evening was that as we all went to leave, I found that some ethically-challenged attendee had apparently stolen my copy of Deborah Harkness’ very enjoyable “The Jewel House” from the table in the pub. It wasn’t a review copy, it was a Christmas present from my wife, and frustratingly I was just about to get to every historian’s favourite bit (the copious endnotes). All the same, I’ll post up a review here while the book’s still fresh in my mind, doubtless cursing under my breath as I type. Oh well!

The Tepenecz f1r signature…

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Back in February 2005, I decided to use my m4d image-processing 5k1llz to try to see how much of the erased owner’s signature at the bottom of f1r (the very first page) of the Voynich Manuscript I could reasonably reconstruct.

tepenec-raw

The reason the signature is so invisible is because some (probably early 17th century) owner physically scrubbed that part of the page really, really clean, to the point that there’s basically no ink there, nada, zilch. All that remains is no more than a subtle half-shadow, a ghostly echo that you have to enhance over and over and over to snatch even a vague glimpse. Well, that’s what I did four years ago – and here’s what ultimately came out of the process:-

tepenec-fake

By a twist of fate, I discovered this week just how correct my interpretation of the signature is (it’s actually surprisingly close). But that’s actually someone else’s story, which I hope to blog about at a later date…

Books for Christmas 2008…

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Here’s a quicky list of books I’m looking forward to reading in the near future, some of which will doubtless already have been gift-wrapped by oddly-familiar elves. Of course, those with book tokens or pockets wadded full of spare cash may prefer to wait until January/February 2009 to read my reviews first, but where’s the fun in that? 🙂

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale. Though it was pricy in hardback (I first mentioned it here), it looks to be a must-read in softback. A fascinating historical take on the birth of modern forensics under the mass-media gaze in Victorian England (with awards aplenty for the writing).

The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution by Deborah Harkness. I just saw this briefly mentioned in the Guardian Review section last Saturday: it deals with the proto-scientific community in Elizabethan London. Plenty of old friends of ours (L’Obel and co) pop up, so should be a fascinating slice of historical pie.

John Dee’s Conversations with Angels by Deborah Harkness. Another fascinating slice of broadly the same historical pie by the same author. I have long said that the full story of Dee’s angelic discussions has yet to be written (though Renaissance Curiosa had a good attempt): perhaps this will take us a step closer? I hope so…

Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood. This is something I’ve covered in the blog before (I reviewed Russell’s “Inventing The Flat Earth” a while back, for example) and thought nobody apart from me had much interest in it, but (to my surprise) here’s a brand new book on the subject.

The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 by Stephen Gaukroger looks interesting too. Publishers now think that the word “magisterial” in any review is supposed to be some kind of kiss of death, but when the subject matter presses so many of my buttons, I don’t really care. 🙂

At the end of the year in which John North died, I’m also thinking about doing a completist thing in 2009 and working my way through his works: specifically, rereading The Ambasssador’s Secret and God’s Clockmaker (of course), but also going through some of his articles I haven’t seen.

Voynich Research 2.0

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I’ve had a number of off-blog posts, all commiserating with my apparent Voynich research burnout. All very kind, thank you for your support – but it ain’t actually so. Rather, what has happened is that I’ve been facing up to the shape of Voynich research to come – a change of direction so huge that I simply can’t carry it all on my own shoulders.

How will you recognize this Voynich Research 2.0? Once you fully accept the VMs’ basic art history (that it was made sometime between 1450 and 1500), the logical conclusion is that we should stop looking in the easy-but-wrong places (1.0, red below) and start looking in the hard-but-right places (2.0, green below)…

voynichresearchflowchart

The reasoning is simple: because the VMs is a mid-Quattrocento object, the right place to be looking for contemporary mentions is in Quattrocento diaries and letters circa 1450-1475, the right place to be looking for sources for the imagery and secrets in the VMs is in the Trecento (specifically the Florentine Trecento), while codicology and palaeography now need to give way to multispectral forensic evidence. As for “whodunit”, I still think that it will turn out to be Antonio Averlino (as per my efforts within the Voynich Research 1.0 paradigm), but it will take a whole new kind of concerted search to uncover the full story behind the VMs.

My prediction is that 2009 will be the year when Voynich researchers will start to make the transition over to Voynich 2.0 thinking (and a whole lot of academics will join the party too), while by 2010 the whole 1.0 paradigm will be lost on the fringes.

So, what’s it to be? Where are you headed next?

Voynich at Kalamazoo 2009…

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The high point of the Medieval Studies conference calendar is undoubtedly the International Congress at Kalamazoo, Michigan: but career academics have long demonstrated reserve about (if not outright fear of) presenting anything there on the minefield that is the Voynich Manuscript.

For a start, even its name is historically imprecise: if it turns out to be post-1450, it’s not really medieval per se but “early modern”, and so shouldn’t technically be called a “manuscript” at all. Yet given that its stylistics arguably point to the late 1440s at the very earliest, while its quire numbering hand remains resolutely 15th century, it probably falls just on the wrong side of that particular line. Still, Kalamazoo is a broad church, with plenty of room for all denominations, so nobody’s going to get too picky about that.

Yet though the VMs does occasionally raise its head above the swallowtail merlons in Kalamazoo specialist sessions (such as the 2005 and 2006 “Codes and Ciphers Through The Middle Ages” panels which I mentioned here), it seems a very long time indeed (ever?) since anyone took it on in a full presentation. So all credit to the courageous Angela Catalina Ghionea, who has just announced her Voynich Manuscript-centred session scheduled at the 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies on 7th-10th May 2009, called “The Alchemical “Voynich”. New Evidence for a Genuine Alphabet, Shamanic Imagery, and Magical Plants“.

Might this be the start of something big? If 2008 was the Novelistic Year of the Voynich, could 2009 turn out to be the Academic Year of the Voynich? Right now, I’d probably instead punt my armchair pundit’s virtual wad on 2010 being the year it finally goes mainstream: but it would nice to be proven wrong for a change. 🙂

“Anarchy in the UK” Walk round London…

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Fancy a walk around London? There are some real scorchers to choose from at London Walks, a company offering fascinating pedestrian slices through the many-layered cake that is our dear Londinium. But for Voynicheros, one walk in particular stands out: “Anarchy in the UK – Mob Rule & Terror Tactics” hosted by writer Ed Glinert, and which should start at Goodge Street at 10:45 am on 17 Jan 2009 (I found it mentioned here on a weirdlondon blog).

The walk is planned to cover “Voynich, Kropotkin, Maletesta, plus Orwell, Stalin, Lenin and even Hitler!“: so, not really your average Saturday morning walk around town, then. £7 for adults.