VMs: Re: Important

["GC" <gc-@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeff wrote:

> I will say this once and only once. Listen to Glen Claston. I have run
some
> tests on his transcription and can see where he is going. If you ignore
what
> I say here you will miss a GOLDEN opportunity.

I truly appreciate your sentiment Jeff, but transcription is a matter of
interpretation on this list, mine being a weakly stated interpretation at
present, and I've pointed out that what I've made available is not up to
MrSid standards as yet.

Unlike my sometimes angry political views, my comments on the writing of the
bifolios as opposed to page-progressive were based on observation of data
collected from my transcription and not gut feeling.  I posted this in two
pdf's, one a forward and the other a reverse sort.  The first one was
entitled allwords.pdf, but I'd have to look up the second.   Hopefully
someone archived these files, but if not, let me know.  They're on my old
hard-drive, and I'll slavishly upload them on a connection slower than
snail-mail.  They're font-encoded in pdf, so you don't have to print out a
conversion table to see what I'm presenting or download a font to read them.

The information is printed from my database and listed by word, quire,
folio, and Currier's "hands".  The real tale is in the longer rare words,
that tend to occur on the same side of bifolios - not consecutive bound
folios as one might expect.  Currier's [a] is in black and Currier's [b] in
red, so when you start seeing entire pages of red, you immediately get a
real visual of the Currier statistical "hands" and what that's all about.
It puts a little makeup on some rather dry numbers, anyway.

There are even some clues in this presentation that lean toward certain
herbal bifolios, both in [a] and in [b], being closely associated, but not
in the right order or sequence of writing.  I don't remember if I put this
list of folios on the VMS-list, or simply jotted it down on some now lost
personal page, but I know I ran some numbers that argued very strongly for a
different ordering of herbal bifolios than what is presented in the VMS as
it currently stands.  I do know I walked away from the excursion reasonably
certain that the VMS herbal section was written bifolio flat, one side at a
time.  There are more definitive ways of looking at this that would help
clear up some of these questions, but I never followed through because the
exact order of individual herbal bifolios has little bearing (to me) on
what's encoded in the text.  All I needed to know is whether the thing was
written folio by folio as it is bound, or by flat bifolio.  I do remember
getting a little laugh out of myself when I realized that the back sides of
the bifolios weren't necessarily written directly after the front sides.

Of course, none of this bears on Nick's question of when the images were
colored, but the images were at least outlined before the text was inserted.
If the text was written bifolio-flat, and the images were at least outlined
before the text, my assumption would be that the price of tea in China has
no real meaning until you know the current currency conversion rate.
Anyway, those files are available, so draw your own conclusions, and if
you're interested in looking at the data in other ways, the old database
file from which this info was extracted is still available.  Perhaps with a
few more qualified observations we're starting to get a hazy picture of VMS
production.

I just finished downloading the last sid file, finally!   Now it's back to
my cave.  I've a lot of work on my plate - two or three months to update my
transcription and work on the herbal section in the meantime.  You probably
wonder why the herbal section instead of the more voluminous text in later
sections?  Each folio is a short little package, not contiguous text like
the stars section, for instance.  True, it's more difficult to work on a
short section of text than a long one, but in this case you have over 100
individual packets of thought, each starting the same and with similar
subject matter, with fairly large and unambiguous text, an important
consideration in previous images.  The same is true of the pharma section.

I'll be around, but I'll probably be off-list for awhile.  Ain't no thing -
I'm
just stepping out for pizza.

GC

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