Benedek Láng: Beyond the Da Vinci Code and the Voynich manuscript. Ciphers as historical sources

Cryptography, i.e. the science of encrypted messages, is well known among laypeople; many thrillers choose it as a central theme. However, much less is known about the recently formulated discipline, historical cryptography, an interdisciplinary research path on historical ciphers, cipher keys, and code-breaking. In this talk, I will first show how historical linguists, archivists, computational linguists, visual recognition experts, and historians cooperate on a corpus that makes up approximately 1% of all the survived handwritten sources of the archives. Second, I will discuss the research questions of my field: the social history of cryptography.