There are few moments in academic life that so successfully simulate the futility of human endeavour as staring at a loading bar while 120,000 rows of data grind through a script like a constipated tortoise. It is a sort of epistemological purgatory: not quite Dante’s Inferno, but certainly the lesser-known ninth circle of Microsoft Excel. And here I am, a very occasional tourist in the land of empirical research trapped in this bleak waiting room of science, watching nothing happen in real time. I don’t do this often. Every two or three years, something compels me to wander outside the agreeable pastures of black-letter law into the pixelated trenches of data cleaning, coding, and praying that the file won’t crash. It is like jury duty or visiting relatives in hospital: necessary, slightly noble, best kept brief. This time, it is an ambitious little research project involving a mountain of institutional data. Somewhere in this digital mulch is the thing I’m looking for, like a signal,...