Reading, parsing, and inferring the direction of travel

[emochoa]

The paper states that after computationally identifying texts that contained at least two city names, researchers "systematically read" (6) nearly 3000 transliterated tablets in search of "mentions of cargo shipments or individual travels" (6). Does this mean that the texts were human-read or machine-read for this step?

If human-read, what factors influenced the decision not to parse the texts computationally for this step?

If machine-read, were nearby words considered to infer the direction of travel, or was the direction assumed from the order in which the cities were mentioned?

[cernhofer]

Ha this is very similar to my question 😬