Re: VMs: introducing myself and 2 questions :)

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sebastian,

Welcome to the group! :-)

> i have 2 questions first:
> -first one is the standard questions: where can i get a copy of the
>  manuscript? i had a look at google, some university librarys and at
>  amazon (they will have one that will be published in march 2004).
>  is there anybody from germany here that can help me or get me some
>  tips where i can found a copy?

You can buy a "CopyFlo" copy of the Voynich from the Beinecke Library 
itself - it's a nice object to own, despite its poor (photocopy-style) quality.

Or you can find one of the various mirrors to the no-ip.com scans - there 
was one on http://www.flamingjesus.com/voynich/ for example - and download 
all the jpegs to your own PC, where you can browse them at your leisure. 
These are better quality than the CopyFlo, though note that some pages 
(like the "9-rosette" pages) are missing (I've put some scans of these 
pages up on http://www.voynich.info/phpwiki/ )

> -second one is about the mailinglist-archive. i read on the website, that
>  listmember nick pelling is evaluating a possibility to archive the emails
>  and make it available trough the web.
>  so i took a look at the textarchives provided on the website and im quite
>  shure, that it would be easy to archive all mails in a opensource-database
>  like mysql and provide it with a search-interface (ok, for a good one -
>  that would be taking some time :) ).
>  i could write such a program and i could also host the database on my
>  company-webserver. but of course first of all i would like to ask if
>  anyone is currently working on this task? :)

There are two immediate barriers here:-
(a) [tech-centric]: how can you transform a large mailing list archive into 
something more "useful"?
(b) [user-centric]: what do we mean by "useful"?

When I want to search the old mailing list archives, I "cd 
c:\Voynich\archives\" and "grep John.Dee *.txt" - however, I'd prefer to be 
able to do this on the Web, and to search both old and new archives at the 
same time. I'd classify that as the "base level" for usefulness - 
universal, accessible, consistent.

To achieve this, the first task needing doing would be to make the 
1991-2001 mailing list archives accessible as individual posts (rather than 
as huge flat text files) - unzipping these from 
http://www.voynich.net/reeds/vmail.html and MHonArc'ing them into 
individual posts (thus making them searchable via external search engines) 
is the kind of thing you'd need to do to achieve this.

However... there are issues of scale: I don't know of any tool that would 
be comfortable with the (12Meg? 15Meg?) of posts that this would generate - 
it may be that MHonArc would be sufficient to achieve this, but you'd need 
to try it for yourself. Similarly, I'm not sure that a mySQL db would scale 
for complex queries on such a large dataset without grinding your machine 
*really* hard.

So: it may be that we don't need a dedicated mySQL/PHP hosting arrangement 
set up, but just to ensure that everything is accessible via Google, and 
then to write a tiny wrapper around the Google API - or (simpler still) a 
JavaScript form in a top frame to compose search strings to send to Google 
(ie, returning results in a separate frame). This is no more than making 
Google power-user search tools a little bit more accessible - let someone 
else's PC take the strain. :-)

However, one fascinating idea you might like to think about is a simple 
combination of mySQL/PHP and Google: if you host a dedicated search page 
(which wraps around Google Advanced Search features, or around the Google 
API), you could keep an accessible *history of searches* made by other 
Voynich researchers.

You might think about developing that history of searches into a 
categorised search engine wrapper - search by page, search by name, search 
by location, search by topic, etc. This is like a kind of "passive 
WikiWiki" - gradually building up a search structure over time.

Anyway, despite having more questions than answers (as per normal), I hope 
this is of at least some help to you. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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