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Anyways Sorry To Rant - Blog Posts
At first glance this seemed pretty outrageous to me. It just so happens that it was at the intersection of two of my great passions, computer science and manuscript studies (one of which I have a career in), so I was super interested to read the study being referenced. After having done so this seems like a pretty standard case of "scientists propose new methodology and speculate on possible results, media reports those possible results as fact, everyone yells at scientists".
(Turns out I have a lot of Feelings about this, so, uh... here’s a read more?)
Nowhere in the study to the researchers make any claim at having cracked Voynich. All they conclude is that, "The application of our methods to the Voynich manuscript suggests that it may represent Hebrew, or another abjad script, with the letters rearranged to follow a fixed order". They're super clear about the fact that all they found was a suggestion, open to interpretation - "The results presented in this section could be interpreted either as tantalizing clues for Hebrew as the source language of the VMS, or simply as artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming and language models".
These researchers are computer scientists, and the study is about computer science. It is mostly an examination of the accuracy of various algorithms, with a section on what happened when they applied the method to Voynich. Getting into a discussion of Medieval Hebrew is outside of their scope (and probably the scope of their funding), so they pass their results on to other experts, saying, "In any case, the output of an algorithmic decipherment of a noisy input can only be a starting point for scholars that are well-versed in the given language and historical period."
This is where lines from the linked Times of Israel like, "Why the Canadians didn’t tap a Hebrew linguist to shore up their claims is confounding to many in academia" really seem off base. First of all, they didn't make any claims, they suggested a possibility. And passing their results on to let experts in other fields run with them is a great way to do science.
And lines like "Like others before them, I think the authors have gone public too early. You can’t declare victory when your proposal, one, isn’t reproducible and, two, doesn’t result in a decryption that makes sense" seem to straight up undermine what I think is a really cool way for academia to function. Skipping over the statement about declaring victory, going public is a great thing to do! It lets other people be inspired by your work and take it in new directions. Jealously hoarding research is really bad for everyone.
I get that "New Methodology in Deciphering Unknown Scripts Proposed" is way less interesting than "Scientists Crack Famous Medival Enigma Using Google Translate Instead of a Medieval Hebrew Scholar". But these researchers did really interesting work and were diligently scientific. We owe them the same when responding. Instead it seems like no one responding even bothered to read the study.
And honestly? This misses all the really interesting stuff that was in the study! Their algorithim is actually really cool and exciting! They managed to get really good results decoding texts where they didn't know the language or the script. And then they did that on texts where they didn't know if there were vowels! AND THEN they did that on texts where they letters might have been scrambled! Friends, that is so cool and exciting!! It makes me want to go try their methods on Linear A RIGHT NOW!
To bring this back to manuscript studies, this is a great example of how important primary sources are. If you read the responses to this study you get a wildly different picture (presented with confidence) than if you consult the text. This is part of why I get so excited about manuscript digitization - not having to rely on transcriptions and commentaries is really important (plus manuscripts are pretty!).
And on a broader scale, this way that the media commonly reports on scientific studies as unequivocal facts scares me. When you remove all the uncertainty and proposals for further research from these findings, they naturally seem absurd and contradictory. I worry that this can undermine people's confidence in what science can tell us. We can change how science is reported on with our responses.
