Archetype: Voynich Palaeography
Abstract
A palaeographic database of the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 408) built with the Archetype framework (formerly DigiPal), developed at King's Digital Lab, King's College London. The database contains 203 manuscript images, 1,684 annotated graphs (images of individual letter forms), 8 scribal hand classifications, and 5 diagnostically significant allograph categories (iin, in, k, sh, weirdos). The hand labels follow the section-based classification proposed by Lisa Fagin Davis, attributing different sections of the manuscript to different scribes. This dataset is a supplement to the paper "One Hand, Five Labels: A Critical Examination of the Five-Scribe Hypothesis for the Voynich Manuscript" by Torsten Timm. The dataset is designed to be imported into an Archetype Docker instance. Installation instructions are included in the README.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Digital Humanities and Scholarship
Libraries
Manuscripts
and Books
Handwritten Text Recognition Techniques
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Publication date
- 1 March 2026
- Language
- EN
- Document type
- Dataset