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This project is a digital humanities exploration of the Voynich Manuscript, one of the most mysterious and undeciphered texts in history. Using the Voynich Manuscript transliteration files created by René Zandbergen, this project transforms existing transliterations into a structured TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) framework designed for scholarly research and long-term digital preservation.
The primary focus of this project is the creation of a TEI back end that identifies, organizes, and encodes the various plants illustrated throughout the manuscript. By treating each plant as a distinct, structured entity within TEI, the project links textual transliterations to their corresponding botanical imagery, allowing for more systematic comparison and analysis. This approach preserves the manuscript’s unusual symbols, visual structure, and textual uncertainty while making the data machine-readable and searchable.
By re-encoding the Voynich Manuscript in this way, this project aims to provide researchers, students, and digital humanists with new tools to study the manuscript’s herbal sections, explore patterns across illustrations and text, and support future work in botanical identification, manuscript studies, and computational analysis.