Connecting the “Scattered Illogical Dots”: The Ely Green Digital Variorum and the Digital Praxis of Un-Editing

The Ely Green Digital Variorum <https://digitalelygreen.org/> focuses on the autobiography of Ely Green, a biracial man who was born in 1893 and came of age in Sewanee, Tennessee on and around the University of the South. In the 1960s, he shared his hand-written manuscript with two white historians at the university, Arthur Ben Chitty and Elizabeth Chitty, who edited and helped publish the manuscript. Since 1966, multiple editions of Green’s work have appeared, none of them exactly what Green wrote. The aim of the Ely Green Digital Variorum is to draw focus to Green’s manuscript as a cultural and historical artifact that illuminates life in Sewanee at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. This widely neglected autobiography provides a sweeping, firsthand account of the region’s race relations during post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow. As a public-facing digital resource, the project will function as an online critical edition, highlighting variations between the original manuscript and its print editions in the effort to “un-edit” Green’s story. Phases of the project were completed in classrooms over the 2022–2023 academic year, engaging students in archival work, digital research, literary and cultural-historical analysis, diplomatic transcription, and text encoding with TEI-XML. The project is anticipated to formally launch by Spring 2024.