Unsolved Mysteries: The Voynich Manuscript
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- About the Professor
Claire Bowern is Professor of Linguistics. Following graduation from Harvard University in 2004, she spent four years in Rice University’s Department of Linguistics before coming to Yale in 2008. Her research focuses on the languages and history of Indigenous Australia. She has been working with speakers of endangered, Indigenous languages since 1998, both through fieldwork with the last speakers of several languages from Northern Australia and through archival work with historical records, ranging from the 1770s to the mid-1960s. Her work combines traditional methods of language documentation and reconstruction with computational methods more familiar from work in biology. At Yale, she teaches both graduate and undergraduate students about language and language change. In 2016 she saw the Voynich Manuscript and was immediately intrigued, and so over the last few years has begun applying methods of language documentation to this mysterious manuscript.
This article presents the results of investigations using topic modeling of the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke Library MS408). Topic modeling is a set of computational methods which are used to...
The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th Century illustrated cipher manuscript. In this overview of recent approaches to the Voynich manuscript, we summarize and evaluate current work on the language...
This paper outlines the creation of three corpora for multilingual comparison and analysis of the Voynich manuscript: a corpus of Voynich texts partitioned by Currier language, scribal hand...
The Voynichese project provides an open-source Query Viewer and DataSets to aid researchers in the study of the Voynich Manuscript. If you'd like to learn more about the manuscript itself, see...
Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no...
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Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Italian and Professor of Comparative Literature