The method

An investigation that measures whatever it happens to notice produces notes, not evidence. This part is the apparatus that turns one into the other.

Two pieces. A fixed list of questions, asked of every document in every tool, because a tool that skips a question has answered “cannot” — which is data — while a session that skips one has produced nothing comparable. And a corpus of real files, graded the same way, chosen so that no result can be an artifact of what happened to be on one laptop.

The rule that binds them is the one this project would keep if it kept nothing else: write down what you expect before you measure it. The first file in the corpus was chosen as a polymorphism specimen and turned out to have none. That is worth more than a file which confirmed what somebody already believed, and it is only worth anything because the expectation was recorded first.