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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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X Demographics

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 91 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

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 74 81%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Researcher 20 22%
Student > Ph. D. Student 16 18%
Student > Master 12 13%
Other 7 8%
Professor 6 7%
Other 22 24%
Unknown 8 9%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Computer Science 16 18%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 14 15%
Physics and Astronomy 12 13%
Linguistics 7 8%
Social Sciences 6 7%
Other 24 26%
Unknown 12 13%