In glamorous Salford last year, the Early Book Society for the study of manuscripts and printing history held a conference called Codices and Community: Networks of Reading and Production, 1350-1550. Just after the “Weird Science” panel chaired by Toshi Takamiya, there was a talk by Teru Agata (an associate professor at Asia University, a private university in Tokyo) and Mari Agata on “Applications of Text Clustering to the Voynich MS”.
Teru Agata subsequently gave a public seminar on the Voynich Manuscript in February 2008 at the University of Tsukuba, called “Judgment of the Possibility to break Undeciphered Documents -With the Example of the Most Mysterious Manuscript-“. And if the search box in Asia University’s website worked, perhaps there would be more I could dig up there.
OK, so in the big scheme of things “Japanese academic gives at least two talks on the VMs” isn’t really huge news. But it did make me think that perhaps I should start compiling a page listing academics who are actively looking at the VMs, such as Angela Catalina Ghionea (who I mentioned here), Volkhard Huth (who I mentioned here), Gordon Rugg / Andreas Schinner, possibly Peter Forshaw (who seems to enjoy surfing the Renaissance foam surrounding the VMs), and so on. Perhaps at some point they’ll form some kind of critical mass, and the VMs will start being taken seriously?
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…errr, fat chance. 🙁
PS: Google Translate turned a Russian VMs webpage’s references to Rugg into “Ruggie”, “Ragg” and “Ragga”, which made for slightly surreal reading.