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.’ Microgenetics might, due to the restricted dimensions of its object, adopt the hypothesis of an expanded version of the concept of the rough draft (and extend it, for example, to cover the development from the initial workplans to textual adjustments made just before publication).
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).