Re: Some thoughts about process

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Bruce Grant wrote:

> 2. A lot of interesting ideas, such as the current discussion of
>    gallows letters, are floated, and calculations are produced,
>    etc. then the ideas disappear into the archives.
>    Is there some way to gather such quantitative questions or
>    theories and the resulting statistics about ut the VMS into one
>    place (say, a FAQ) where  you could look at it all at once?

Did someone say 'bait'?   :-)
These are my thoughts exactly and my attempts to create this (already
starting many many years ago) have been thwarted by various
difficulties.
A one-man effort won't do it. Organizing the material is very difficult,
and I always felt that it was a presumptuous thing to take the work of
some many people of over almost a decade and sort it into
'important', 'interesting', 'useless', etc. 

Another reason why it is difficult is that we are not an organised
research group. We are all individuals doing our own thing (with
occasional
exceptions) but we do keep the group informed of ideas via the list.
That is of course a very good thing, but we are nothing like a Third
Friedman's Study Groups.
We don't even have 'official' tables of single character frequency,
digraph frequency, word frequency, for the whole MS in _any_
transcription alphabet.
This is the first thing that such a FAQ should contain.

Another obvious reason why one person can't do it is that it is too much
work. Also, there are so much 'fun' things to do. Furthermore, some
things cannot be done in piecemeal fashion, but require a consistent
dedicated effort over some time. This is particularly true for
transcription, but also for writing a good overview (in the sense you
used).

Right now, personally, I am definitely reduced to doing piecemeal things
(such as reading Evans' Rudolf and his world - should have done that 
years ago).

A couple of years ago there was a list member who called himself
Aligator Descartes, who used a tool to convert the mailing list
archive to a  hyper-linked mail history overview (which is no longer
there). That already greatly increased the usefulness of the archive,
and would be a necessary first step for a renewed attempt at creating
the kind of overview we do indeed need to have.

I am sure there are several people on the list who can do this. It
would probably take the space of two geocities accounts to
host this info. I have one available that can be used right now. It
is called 'voynichms' and was originally conceived as a backup for my
main web site.

The condensed information would only be a few megabytes and I would be 
glad to host it at www.voynich.nu. Right now, there is a kind of
placeholder called www.voynich.nu/list.html which mainly has links
to some interesting web pages, but also makes a first attempt at
collecting all the 'odd features' of Voynichese. It was supposed to be
the 'meat' of my website but in reality it is the leastdevelopped area,
for reasons explained at the beginning of this post.

I invite all your suggestions for a cure...

Cheers, Rene