Microgenetic analysis, which sets up and interprets the total compositional development of a short textual fragment, stands in contrast to macrogenetic research, which looks at one or several complete collections of genetic documentation, studying large-scale phenomena. The two approaches will not necessarily work with the same conception of the ‘rough draft.’ […] Macrogenetics, more sensitive to the diversity of genetic ingredients, attentive to pre-textual structuration problems, and studying objects of vast dimension (thousands of pages long, for example), will tend to privilege a tighter definition of the rough draft, conceiving of it exclusively as the compositional space, completely distinct, for example, from manuscripts concerned with the initial planning, the structuring of the scenario, or documentary research.
All of the primary materials in the archive—fragments and related texts—are organized for full electronic search and analysis, and all are embedded in a complex hypertextual environment that makes possible the study of macrogenetic phenomena (that is, phenomena occurring across the documents in the archive) and the analysis of microgenetic details (that is, the salient features of individual documents).