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Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Overview of attention for article published in PLOS ONE, June 2013
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Title
Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript: An Information-Theoretic Analysis
Published in
PLOS ONE, June 2013
DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0066344
Pubmed ID
Authors

Marcelo A. Montemurro, Damián H. Zanette

Abstract

The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book.

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Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Germany 5 5%
United Kingdom 3 3%
Brazil 2 2%
Russia 2 2%
United States 2 2%
Belarus 1 1%
France 1 1%
Luxembourg 1 1%
Unknown 77 82%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 20 21%
Student > Ph. D. Student 19 20%
Student > Master 12 13%
Other 7 7%
Professor 6 6%
Other 21 22%
Unknown 9 10%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Computer Science 19 20%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 14 15%
Physics and Astronomy 12 13%
Linguistics 7 7%
Social Sciences 6 6%
Other 23 24%
Unknown 13 14%