The Voynich Manuscript: from time to time one reads a note about this mysterious manuscript housed in the rare room at Yale University. It is a 600-year-old text, written in an unknown language, illustrated with bizarre imagery, and , writes Quartz, “perhaps best described as a rabbit hole made out of rabbit holes.” It has been described as a genuine, bonafide, world-class mystery.

So, is this document, which has been studied and analyzed for years now been decoded? Newspaper headlines the past few days have trumpeted the news, attributing the feat of decyphering the mystery of decoding The Voynich Manuscript to artificial intelligence.

Not so fast, say experts. The Voynich manuscript remains as inscrutable as ever.

The 15th century book is made of vellum pages and calfskin parchment, rife with elaborate doodles of mysterious plants, and written entirely in a “language” that no one has ever been able to identify, which contains no punctuation, and many interpret as a cipher.about it, the more we just can’t look away.

Please watch the video here:

https://youtu.be/otGlDgvM2qE

As I watched this video, the one thing that kept coming to my mind was that in this 15th century manuscript, the flow of text and illustrations is quite linear. In fact, if you look closely as how the story flows, there is always an illustration on every page, supporting, I assume, what the text describes. The preferred mode for telling stories on mobile devices was already present in this manuscript. While the illustrations are strange and difficult to identify, whoever put this manuscript together realized that it was best to tell the story combining the narrative and illustrations at the same time.

Take a look here:

Now, if we could only know what language this manuscript is written in!

Of related interest

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/1/16959454/voynich-manuscript-mystery-ai-decoded-debunked

Society of News Design New York City 2018

The Society for News Design’s 40th Anniversary Workshop, Creative Conference and Awards Gala will be in New York City, March 22–24.

Workshop chair Tyson Evans, of The New York Times, and an army of volunteers are organizing three packed days of talks, training, networking and inspiration about the future (and past) of storytelling, visual journalism and news products across print and digital.

Speakers announced so far include Scott Stowell, proprietor of Open and winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design; Jennifer Daniel, of Google; John Maeda, of Automattic and visual journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, Vice, ProPublica and more.

I am honored to be one of the speakers.

If you would like to attend what promises to be one of the best SND gatherings ever, please go here for more information:

https://nyc.snd.org