As is often the case at the Imec, the Derrida Hexadecimal project was built around two opportunities brought together. On the one hand, with the addition of Jacques Derrida’s computers to the Imec collections at the end of the 2000s began a series of questions and experiments on how to collect, process and open for research what were soon to be called "born-digital” archives—as opposed to dematerialized or digitized documents. On the other hand, a textual genetics research team at the Item, including Aurèle Crasson, Jeremy Pedrazzi, Jean-Louis Lebrave and Laurent Alonso, had already been working for a few years on the problem of genetic practice as applied to digital documents.

Jacques Derrida was a pioneer in the use of word-processing software. In 1986, he acquired his first Macintosh, which is now held in the Imec collections with two other computers, a hard disk, SyQuest cartridges and numerous floppy disks, underlining the evolution of writing practices and techniques. Starting in 2019, at the invitation of the Imec and with the agreement of the rights holders, the Item team has begun to exploit the data making up the digital corpus of the Jacques Derrida collection. It has implemented computerized excavation techniques influenced by criminal forensics—a methodology unprecedented in France for an archive—and has undertaken a genetic analysis of Jacques Derrida’s digital archives.

But this exploration does not focus on a better understanding of the Derridian writing process only: the Item team, in collaboration with the Imec, has been working for the past year on the development of a "global digital genetics"; in other words, a methodology that can be used for other corpora. Since the case of Jacques Derrida’s computers is far from being an exception, this project and its formalization also represent a major challenge for the Imec, as many collections include digital materials and data. The exploratory methodologies developed as part of the Derrida Hexadecimal project are thus essential to the current and future processing of authors’ and publishers’ archives and, more broadly, to the development of digital archiving.

For more information: http://www.item.ens.fr/derrida-hexadecimal/