Voynich Summer Camp IM, transcript of session #2…

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As promised (though a little later than planned), here’s the transcript of the second IM session I ran at the 2009 Voynich Summer Camp in Budapest. Not quite as meaty as the first IM session, but some OK stuff in there all the same. Enjoy!

[11:56:09] NP: Okeydokey, ready when you are
[11:56:18] vc: Okedykokedy
[11:56:27] NP: 🙂
[11:56:35] vc: We are.
[11:56:35] NP: I think that’s on f113r
[11:56:40] vc: …
[11:56:45] NP: 🙂
[11:56:55] NP: So… how has it all gone?
[11:57:12] NP: Tell me what you now think about the VMs that you didn’t before?
[11:57:27] vc: It should be simple.
[11:57:36] vc: The solution should be simple.
[11:57:41] NP: but…
[11:58:07] vc: But …
[11:58:33] vc: The verbose cipher still permits us a lot of possibilities.
[11:58:52] NP: Verbose cipher only gets you halfway there
[11:59:03] NP: But that’s still halfway more than anything else
[11:59:28] vc: We could synthesize a coding which is capable to produce the same statistical properties as the MS
[11:59:48] NP: Yup, that was (basically) Gordon Rugg’s 2004 paper
[11:59:58] vc: simple enough to do manually of course
[12:00:31] NP: The problem is one of duplicating all the local structural rules
[12:00:40] vc: Gordon’s generating gibberish by encoding gibberish
[12:01:06] NP: Basically
[12:01:25] vc: Yes, we suspect that the text contains real information in a natural language.
[12:01:30] vc: We tried this.
[12:02:06] NP: Rugg’s work requires a clever (pseudo-random) daemon to drive his grille thing… but he never specified how someone 500 years ago could generate random numbers (or even conceive of them)
[12:02:07] vc: We tried to encode for example the vulgata with our method
[12:02:10] NP: ok
[12:02:23] NP: into A or B?
[12:02:24] vc: throw dices I guess?
[12:02:26] vc: lol
[12:02:37] NP: only gives you 1-6 random
[12:02:48] vc: 3 dices
[12:02:52] vc: ect
[12:02:52] NP: two dice give you a probability curve
[12:02:56] NP: not flat
[12:03:02] vc: hmm
[12:03:06] vc: roulette wheel
[12:03:11] NP: Anachronistic
[12:03:19] vc: Ok. We use no random.
[12:03:23] NP: 🙂
[12:03:25] vc: our encoder is deterministic
[12:03:33] NP: Good!
[12:03:35] vc: that’s the point
[12:04:28] vc: We suspect that the “user” added some randomness in some of the aspects of the encoding, but this is not overwhelming
[12:04:49] NP: That’s right
[12:05:21] vc: We also picked out the A and B languages
[12:05:23] NP: Though some aspects (like space insertion into ororor-type strings) were more tactical and visual than random
[12:05:27] NP: Good!
[12:05:33] vc: with different methods
[12:05:52] vc: so we basically verified a lot of past results
[12:06:17] NP: Do you have a synthetic A paragraph you can cut and paste here?
[12:06:17] vc: After that, we decided to concentrate on the first 20 pages
[12:06:22] NP: Good!
[12:07:17] vc: for example, A languages uses ey or y at the end of the words, while B language uses edy instead
[12:07:51] vc: Synthetic sample… ok, just a minute
[12:08:29] NP: ey/y vs edy – Mark Perakh pointed this out too, and suggested that it meant B was less contracted than A. It also forms the core of Elias Schwerdtfeger’s “Biological Paradox”
[12:09:25] vc: Our results are largely independent – the guys didn’t know the past results
[12:09:54] NP: That’s ok. 🙂
[12:10:41] vc: nu stom huhoicpeey strifihuicom ristngngpeet pept suhors periet pescet sticpescom ichoey pt om icpeript
[12:11:17] NP: I hope that’s not EVA
[12:11:41] vc: Y, of course not
[12:12:08] vc: not close, but the whole thing started here when some of us tried out a method which produced some non-trivial statistics very similar to VMS
[12:12:43] NP: I’m certainly getting a partially-verbose vibe off this
[12:12:52] vc: the original:
[12:13:17] vc: haec sunt verba que locutus est
[12:13:18] vc: Moses
[12:13:40] NP: Ummm… that’s pretty verbose, then. 🙂
[12:14:04] vc: Again, a deterministic, static automaton.
[12:14:15] NP: Fair enough!
[12:15:09] NP: Sorry for asking a lecturer-style question, 🙂 but how has doing that affected how you look at Voynichese?
[12:16:03] vc: Sec
[12:16:49] vc: discussing 🙂
[12:17:38] vc: it’s a coded natural language text. We suspect that the language is Italian – from measured results.
[12:18:00] vc: That’s why we are very curious about your news!
[12:18:21] NP: Let’s finish your news first!
[12:18:38] vc: ok. Was that an answer for your question?
[12:19:02] NP: Pretty much – would you like to write it up informally to publish on the blog?
[12:19:55] NP: 1000 words should cover it 🙂
[12:21:18] NP: (you don’t need to write it now!)
[12:21:25] vc: We admit that we would like to work on our theory and method a bit before publishing it, because one of the important statistical feature doesn’t match
[12:21:31] vc: yet
[12:21:35] NP: 🙂
[12:21:52] NP: ok
[12:22:06] NP: that’s good
[12:22:23] NP: what else have you been thinking about and discussing during the week?
[12:22:35] NP: VMs-wise, that is 🙂
[12:22:42] vc: 🙂
[12:22:54] vc: haha, you got the point…
[12:23:02] NP: 🙂
[12:23:56] vc: We toyed with the idea that the astrological diagrams are so poorly rendered that they aren’t astrological diagrams. They are coder tools.
[12:24:10] NP: cipher wheels?
[12:24:22] vc: Kind of. Yes.
[12:24:35] NP: (that’s been suggested many times, though never with any rigour)
[12:24:36] vc: we also tried to identify some of the star names.
[12:24:47] NP: No chance at all
[12:25:01] NP: That is a cliff with a huge pile of broken ships beneath it
[12:25:21] NP: sadly
[12:25:27] vc: been there, done that, yes
[12:25:30] NP: 🙂
[12:26:22] vc: We also observed that the takeshi transcription becomes less reliable when the text is rotated or tilted.
[12:26:36] vc: The other places – it is quite good.
[12:26:45] NP: Yes, that’s a fair enough comment
[12:27:08] NP: A complete transcription has been done, but it hasn’t been released – very frustrating
[12:27:25] NP: (by the EVMT people, Gabriel Landini mainly)
[12:27:17] vc: Also we are not contented with some of the EVA transcription’s choices of the alphabet
[12:27:34] NP: the “sh” really sucks
[12:27:39] vc: YES
[12:27:45] NP: 🙁
[12:28:53] NP: Glen Claston’s transcription added stuff in, many people use that instead purely for its better “sh” handling
[12:29:26] vc: hmm, ok
[12:29:53] NP: In a lot of ways, though, who’s to say? A single ambiguous letter shouldn’t really be enough to destroy an entire dcipherment attack
[12:30:04] NP: given that it’s not a pure polyalpha
[12:30:37] vc: of course
[12:30:54] NP: But analyses still don’t seem to get particularly close
[12:31:03] NP: Oh well
[12:31:23] vc: Analyses of whom
[12:31:24] vc: 🙂
[12:31:25] vc: ?
[12:31:29] vc: 😉
[12:31:35] NP: not yours, of course 😉
[12:32:32] NP: is that your week summarized, then?
[12:32:53] vc: Yes.
[12:33:16] NP: has it been fun? worthwhile? frustrating? dull?
[12:33:32] vc: All of them.
[12:33:34] NP: and would you do another next summer?
[12:33:57] vc: No need of it. Maybe with the rohonc codex
[12:34:00] vc: lol, of course
[12:34:13] NP: 🙂
[12:35:06] NP: I’m really pleased for you all – it sounds like you have managed to get a fairly clearheaded view of the VMs out of the whole process, and have had a bit of fun as well
[12:35:51] NP: Most VMs researchers get very tied up to a particular theory or evidence or way of looking at it – you have to keep a broader perspective to make progress here
[12:35:53] vc: let’s say two bits
[12:36:14] NP: “two bits of fun” 🙂
[12:36:21] NP: good

[I then went into a long digression about the “Antonio of Florence”, about which I’ve already posted far too much to the blog… so –SNIP–]

[12:51:50] vc: ooo wait a sec…
[12:52:16] vc: Can we ask Philip Neal to post some some pages of a reference book he uses?
[12:52:42] vc: sorry about the redundancy
[12:53:02] NP: He’s a medieval Latin scholar by training, what kind of thing would you want?
[12:53:39] vc: about the alchemical herbals. Can we manage it later?
[12:53:45] vc: Please go on
[12:53:51] NP: Well.. that’s about it
[12:54:10] NP: Obviously I typed faster than I thought 🙂

[13:00:11] vc: What do you know? How much people is working on a voynich-deciphering automaton based on markov thingies and such?
[13:00:37] vc: So basically with the same hypotheses like ours?
[13:00:57] NP: The problem with markov models is that they will choke on verbose ciphers, where letters are polyvalent
[13:01:08] NP: Nobody in the literature seems to have picked this up
[13:01:24] vc: bad for them
[13:01:50] NP: Unless you pre-tokenize the stream, Markov model finders will just get very confused
[13:02:03] NP: and give you a linguist-friendly CVCV-style model
[13:02:11] NP: that is cryptographically wrong
[13:03:04] NP: perhaps “multi-functional” rather than “polyvalent”, I’m not sure :O
[13:04:23] NP: So, I’m not convinced that anyone who has applied Markov model-style analysis to the VMs has yet got anywhere
[13:04:29] NP: Which is a shame
[13:05:04] NP: But there you go
[13:05:25] vc: We hope.
[13:05:47] NP: 🙂

[13:06:24] NP: Right – I’ve got to go now (sadly)
[13:06:48] NP: I hope I’ve been a positive influence on your week and not too dogmatic
[13:07:09] vc: Why, of course
[13:07:16] NP: And that I’ve helped steer you in generally positive / constructive directions
[13:07:30] vc: Yes, indeed.
[13:07:35] NP: (Because there are plenty of blind alleys to explore)
[13:07:41] NP: (and to avoid)
[13:07:52] vc: VBI…
[13:07:52] vc: 🙂
[13:08:07] NP: Plenty of that to step in, yes
[13:08:14] NP: 🙂
[13:08:24] NP: And I don’t mean puddles
[13:09:42] vc: Well, thank you again for the ideas and the lots of information 🙂
[13:11:18] vc: Unfortunately semester starts in weeks, so we can’t keep working on this project
[13:12:04] vc: but as soon as we earn some results, we will definitely contact you
[13:12:15] NP: Excellent, looking forward to that
[13:12:54] NP: Well, it was very nice to meet you all – please feel free to subscribe to Cipher Mysteries by email or RSS (it’s free) so you can keep up with all the latest happenings.
[13:13:23] vc: ok 🙂
[13:13:57] NP: Best wishes, and see you all for the Rohonc week next summer 🙂
[13:14:04] NP: !!!!!
[13:14:11] vc: lol 🙂
[13:14:21] vc: that’s right! 😉
[13:15:16] NP: Excellent – gotta fly, ciao!
[13:15:36] vc: Best!
[13:15:37] vc: bye

“Voynich Conspiracy” now running in Prague…?

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A blog post dated yesterday (26th September 2009) contains a discussion with German fantasy author Susanne Gerdom. Curiously, she says:

Die “Voynich-Verschwörung” spielt nun leider in Prag, und das ist inzwischen bei Fantasyautoren beinahe so en vogue wie Vampire und Elben.

I was so surprised at what the first half appeared to be saying that I asked Philip Neal: very kindly (and quickly), he pinged back his translation:-

The “Voynich Conspiracy” is now on show in Prague – unfortunately – and in the mean time it is nearly as modish with fantasy authors as vampires and elves.

So… it would seem that “Voynich-Verschwörung” is a reference to some kind of play / show / exhibition running in Prague. But if so, I’ve never heard of it; and (as you’ve probably worked out by now) I’m perpetually listening out for anything like that. Has anybody any idea what this is referring to? Please leave a comment if you happen to find out!

Jhen & the Voynich Manuscript…

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A Voynich Manuscript-themed episode of Franco-Belgian comic book The Adventures Of Jhen has just (September 2009) come out. Entitled “La Sêrênissime“, this takes the eponymic late-medieval hero Jhen from Milan in 1432 on to Venice: unsurprisingly, he is “en quête d’un certaine livre“, as it says here.

la-serenissime

The comic has a nice ligne claire style, and evokes both Venice from the air and St Mark’s Basilica, which (considering that’s what I think is at the centre of the nine-rosette page) is either great research or a splendid coincidence. I’ve only seen a few sample pages from Jean Pleyers’ website (click on the [Actualities] button on the left of his screen to get to the samples) so far, but it does look like quite a nice thing to buy if you’re looking to expand your collection of Voynichiana. I’m sure Dennis will be pleased! 🙂

Report on the Kevin Knight MIT lecture…

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Well, Kevin Knight gave his Voynich lecture (it’s the one I mentioned a few days ago), and an attendee (Jeffrey Shallit) has been kind enough to post a high-speed précis of what Kevin Knight said onto his “Recursivity” blog. Of course, since you already know the basics, I can strip that down even further. 🙂

As I mentioned before, Kevin Knight’s approach is based around using expectation maximization to try to algorithmically categorize the letters in the alphabet into one of two clusters – basically, vowels and consonants. However, despite the looming vowel-like presence of ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, and ‘o’ (that so convinces linguists), this approach fails to produce “anything particularly meaningful” for Voynichese.

His more recent research has tried the same trick but with words instead of letters. According to Jeffrey Shallitt’s post:-

When you do so, you get two clusters: the words in the “herbal”, “astrological”, and “pharmacological” sections predominantly fall into one cluster, and the words in the “biological” and “cosmological” sections predominantly fall into another.

However, Knight’s attempts to further subdivide these two clusters failed to produce any (linguistically) helpful clusters.

I think that while this is manifestly unhelpful to linguistic VMs theories, it may yet prove to be codicologically very productive. My position is that Voynichese evolved over time, and that the VMs itself was composed in a number of writing phases: it may well be that the clusters that are emerging are clusters in time, not in content. Could it be that this kind of cluster analysis could be used to reconstruct the developmental arc of Voynichese?

I hope that Kevin Knight decides to make his clustering results available, so that they may be assessed in the context of quite different (non-linguistic) ways of looking at it…

Anthony Grafton article on the Republic of Letters…

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I just saw (via H-ITALY) an announcement for an online peer-reviewed journal from Stanford:

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new digital journal, Republics of Letters. This peer-reviewed, open-access publication is dedicated to the study of knowledge, politics, and the arts, from Antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the early-modern period.

Its first issue has a splendidly accessible article by Anthony Grafton called “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters”, a broad-brush outline of the historical and political development of the Republic of Letters (Respublica Literarum) from 1500 all the way to the Enlightenment. If you only know a little bit about this fascinating subject, I’d recommend his overview as a really good high-level starting point.

Grafton is always good value for money: but I note with suspicion a number of Simon Schama-esque TV tropes edging into his prose – for example, his “Pedantic Park” metaphor seems peculiarly strained and gratuitous in print, far more suited to being used as a throwaway TV documentary conceit to be consumed and instantly forgotten. Perhaps our Princeton Professor has plans, who knows?

Nick Pelling online radio interview with Red Ice Creations…

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Just to let you know that a Voynich Manuscript radio interview I gave a few days ago (either download it, or click on the Flash Player play button [half a screen down on the right] to hear it) has just gone live on the Red Ice Creations website. They wanted me to chat about all things Voynich… and an hour later I eventually ran out of steam. 🙂

Pretty much all the fashionable VMs research topics you’d expect to me to crank out – Wilfrid Voynich, John Dee, Rudolf II, Rene Zandbergen, Sinapius, Newbold, dating, TV documentaries, the nine-rosette page, page references, the evolution of Voynichese, cipher history, Trithemius, Leon Battista Alberti, unbreakable ciphers, intellectual history, books of secrets, Brunelleschi’s hoist, enciphered machines, Voynich Bullshit Index, Quattrocento intellectual paranoia, patents, even quantum computing! – get covered, so there should be something there for nearly everyone. 🙂

And if that’s not enough for you, Red Ice Radio has a 45-minute follow-on interview with me in their member-only area: this covers cryptology, intractability, alchemy, Adam Maclean, hoax theories, Gordon Rugg, Cardan grilles, postmodernism, astronomy, astrology (lunar and solar), calendars, Antonio Averlino / Filarete, canals, water-powered machines, (not) the head of John the Baptist, Alan Turing, Enigma, Pascal, the Antikythera Mechanism, Fourier analysis, Ptolemaic epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Kryptos sculpture, Tamam Shud, Adrenalini Brothers, steganography, copy vs original, wax tablets, even al-Qaeda!

OK, I’m not a professional broadcaster, and it’s all impromptu (so there are a handful of pauses), but it does bring plenty of Voynich-related stuff that’s appeared here over the last 18 months together into a single place. Enjoy!

“Voynich Manuscript Project” short film…

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Are you a male Caucasian, 51-60, living near upstate NY, and interested in a non-speaking, “wizard-esk” (I guess “-esque”) acting role in a vaguely Voynich Manuscript-related film to be filmed 15th-25th October 2009?

Well… Phill Allison, a directing major at the NYC school of visual arts, is holding “auditions / meetings” in Valatie on 8th-11th October 2009 for this role, so feel free to step forward: his short film (for his thesis) is called “The Voynich Manuscript Project”, and is “the story of two brothers who live with their father in a strange reality on the cusp of religious transformation“, and who “discover a mysterious manuscript in the woods“.

Hmmm… male, Caucasian, 51-60, doesn’t speak much, interested in a mysterious manuscript, perpetually on the cusp of finding something amazing / enlightenment… sounds like a pretty good e-fit for plenty of the Voynich researchers out there. Or have I just given the punchline away? :-p

James Amelang’s “The Flight of Icarus”…

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I think you can split history books into three basic types:-

  • Books that retell us what we already know – i.e. a missed opportunity
  • Books that tell us about things we didn’t know – i.e. a pleasant surprise
  • Books that change our minds about things we thought we knew – i.e. gold dust

It should therefore already be no surprise to you that I place Jim Amelang’s excellent (1998) “The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe” firmly in the thirdmost of these categories: it’s one of those books that not only places depth-charges beneath a whole sequence of tacit assumptions about history you weren’t previously aware that you had, but also presses the big red button to blow them up right in your face.

Structurally, while Amelang’s work is a hugely broadened study of early modern artisan autobiographical works that grew out of his initial research into the milieu of the Barcelonan tanner Miquel Parets (d.1660), what I think he brings to the party is a sensitivity to the nuances of the cultural and social life of basically ordinary working people that is wholly lacking in nearly all similar books. Amelang repeatedly demonstrates his ability to nimbly avoid back-projecting contemporary conceptions of such easily-misused notions as public, private, citizenship, the people, fact, fiction, authorship, emphasis, silence, insider, and outsider onto his early modern target period: ultimately, the result of his careful scholarship (which focuses on the particular but with flashes of the general) is that readers come to find their own subtle prejudices being uncomfortably brought to the fore.

For me, “Icarus” is at its very best in Chapter Four (‘Allegiances’) – thanks to Amelang’s extensive raking over of the Barcelonan notarial archives, this builds up a dauntingly complex picture of the web of allegiances and connections around Miquel Parets – the etiquette and practice of god-parents, dowries, executors, competitors, guilds, notarial witnesses, politics, neighbours, religion, meetings, friends, loyalties, etc. It could be argued that Amelang’s weakest parts are where he tries to draw parallels with later autobiographies by members of disadvantaged or minority groups (specifically women, slaves, etc) by referring to works grounded in (for example) full-on feminist ideologies: all the same, there is still a little meat to be had there, though it is clearly a somewhat less sustaining soup than he boils up elsewhere.

Given the huge scope of his final project, it is unsurprising that there are numerous other autobiographical works omitted from the list of works given: the three that kept springing to my mind are Marin Sanudo’s epic 58 volumes of diaries, Antonio Averlino’s libro architettonico (which, for all its fictional side, has been stripmined by historians for decades), and even John Dee’s angelic diaries (which have similarly been subjected to unrelenting analysis as a kind of implicit autobiography). All three follow Amelang’s template, where the early modern artisan hopes to effect personal-transformation-from-an-outsider-to-an-insider-through-intense-creativity (p.48).

At the end of it, it felt to me as though Amelang’s sustained focus on artisanal autobiographical writings had brought him to his own Zen moment. That is, I got the impression that the process of looking for his subjects’ prejudices through close reading had forced him to confront (and overcome) his own tacit historical prejudices about early modern life, and to produce a genuinely even-handed view of what life was actually like for people in their own context. And how many historical books can you think of that come remotely close to that?

Dan Brown and the Dorabella Cipher…

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Apparently, Chapter 41 of “The Lost Symbol” namechecks a handful of cipher mysteries, which probably explains the Dorabella Cipher search query spike I noticed over the last few days. So, a minor mystery solved (for a change), I’d guess:-

“…after [Langdon’s] experiences in Rome and Paris, he’d received a steady flow of requests asking for his help deciphering some of history’s great unsolved codes—the Phaistos Disk, the Dorabella Cipher, the mysterious Voynich Manuscript.”

Of course, only a cryptological schmuck taking Elonka’s famous list of unsolved codes & ciphers at face value would put Dorabella right up there with the VMs – so that must have been added by the copy-editors, right?

PS: here’s a recent blog entry on a proposed solution to the Dorabella Cipher.

VMs parallel hatching / dating page…

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It’s been a good while coming, but here it (finally) is: my page arguing for an earliest date for the VMs of 1440 (if Florence) or 1450 (if not).

Though it may not at first seem much of a conclusion, this is an argument based not on possibilities but on placing an artefact within an overall history of drawing technique – an argument about what the Voynich Manuscript actually is, and in which visual traditions we can place its drawings – a poster child for “Voynich Research 2.0”, in other words.