Correlation between text and pictures

[Rene Zandbergen <rene@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

I would say something about why I think there could be a
correlation between text and pictures in the VMs (which
is not exactly the same as saying that the text belongs
with the pictures).

Of course, there is a very strong point against such a
correlation: the Herbal-A (HeA) and -B (HeB) pages have
the same type of illustrations, yet vastly different text
statistics. If we want to maintain that the HeA and HeB
text are about the same subject, we have a few difficult
questions to answer.

Now for some other considerations.
Petersen counted both sides of folio 58 as belonging with
the stars section (there are some stars on it). Now
f58 is in a quire which also has a few cosmo pages, a few
herbal ones and lots of missing ones. (If this was the
executive summary, it is in an odd place, but anyway).
The 'real' stars section is from ff.103-116 (quire 20).
Several years ago, I pointed out the fact that some pages
in this quire have frequent occurrences of the word
'qokeey' (4OFCC9) while others do not have it at all.
This is also the case for f58. Zero occurrences on the
recto and six on the verso. Coincidence? Perhaps. 
Another 'stars section' word is 'raiin' (2AM),
which has only few occurrences outside this section.
This seems like a case of a subject-matter-dependent word,
but admittedly there are not many such clear cases.

Another point which I think supports the correlation
between text and pictures (and perhaps increases the
chance that there is meaning in the VMs) is the fact
that the word frequency distribution of the labels (notably
the zodiac labels) is much flatter than for the running
text. Clearly, the labels are not just running text written
word for word. If they are star names or latitudes, or
properties for the corresponding degree of the zodiac, this
would be expected.
An oddity in the zodiac labels is the occurrence of a number
of them beginning with oeeo-. This is only over a few signs
(mostly Virgo and Libra). The same prefix also occurs in
the circular text in that area. I don't know what it means
but I am convinced that it means _something_

I look forward to seeing other examples or in fact counter-
examples.

Cheers, Rene