This article begins by discussing a few general statements about the traces found by geneticists who explore authors’ manuscripts in order to elucidate the creative process. The methods developed by genetic criticism for handwritten documents can be used as a starting point to study traces of a new type, namely those that can be extracted from born digital documents. The research is made even more difficult since in some cases, the nature of these traces is unknown, so as their possible localisation. Here, we present the results of a research which started in 2018 on Jacques Derrida’s digital archives. The main objective was to create codicological tools adapted to the study born of scriptural digital creation. More precisely, the Derrida Hexadécimal Project was threefold. First, to divert forensic methods and apply them to the corpus of an author who had theorised the concept of archive long before he turned to digital technology as a writing tool and archival device. Second, to…