Event time:
Friday, October 10, 2025 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location:
Room 208
53 Wall Street
New Haven, CT
06511
Event description:
Hosted by the Linguistics Department:
“The Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript”
Colin Layfield (Senior Lecturer, University of Malta, Department of Computer Information Systems, Malta)
Lisa Fagin Davis (Director, Medieval Academy of America, Boston)
The lecture will be held at 53 Wall St 208 from 12-1:30pm on Friday, October 10. Lunch will be served.
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ABSTRACT
The Voynich Manuscript (VM) is a medieval manuscript likely written in the 15th century (Yale Univ., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 408). The manuscript is written in an unknown language or code using an unidentified set of symbols that has yet to be made legible. Additionally, the codex contains many strange and fantastical images of plants, people, and cosmological/zodiac illustrations, the meaning of which are also unknown. One of the main research avenues into the VM is to examine its textual content to understand how it behaves relative to known texts; this can provide insight as to whether the mysterious writings contain decipherable text or not. In this presentation, Layfield and Davis will present new insights into the content and original structure of the Voynich Manuscript using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA).