How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript

It can be safely claimed that there is no medieval script that has been seen, analyzed, and debated more than that of the mysterious and as-yet-unread Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408). For centuries, bibliophiles, linguists, codicologists, art historians, and amateur cryptologists have pored over the manuscript, examining it from every angle, debating every wormhole, arguing over every stain and crease. Some things we know: the invented script is comprised of carefully-written glyphs without precedent or obvious model; forensic material evidence has determined that the parchment, ink, and pigments date from the early 15th century; the provenance trail is nearly unbroken from the seventeenth century to today. But we still don’t know how to read it, in spite of new theories flying across the internet on a near-weekly basis. “Voynichologists” disagree as to some of the most important and basic questions about the manuscript. How many letterforms are there? How many scribes can be identified? Are there ligatures, majuscules, abbreviations, and other scribal conventions? These questions have never been satisfactorily answered. Using digital paleographic methodologies including the Archetype (DigiPal) application and other annotation tools, this project will revisit the paleographic analyses of the Voynich glyphs to propose answers to some of these questions and discuss how these answers open avenues for further research

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building and Using a Linked Open Data Environment for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Studies

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes--are brought together in a Linked Open Data environment, constructed by the team members from the e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the Semantic Computing Group at Aalto University in Finland, to aggregate, enhance, and present the data, with a data model based on the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies. While also considering the challenges and successes of this international collaboration, Dr Lynn Ransom (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania) will show how the project builds on the data and functionality of the source datasets and enables new approaches to research in manuscript history and provenance

Is Information Out There?

In this paper, I argue that the distinction between information and data lies at the root of much confusion that surrounds the concept of information. Although data are ‘out there’ and concrete, informational content is abstract and always co-constituted by information agents – a set which includes at least linguistically capable human beings. Information is thus not an intrinsic property of concrete data, but rather a relational property, which relies on the existence of information agents. To reach this conclusion I first argue that the semantic content of human-generated data is co-constituted by the information agent. In the second part I broaden the scope and argue that environmental information also depends on information agents. I further consider and reject both Dretske’s view of information as an objective commodity and foundational accounts of information, that take information to be the fundamental ingredient of reality

Not Its Own Meaning: A Hermeneutic of the World

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable