View source for The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/Project Mailer 2015

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">''The Mailer Review''/Volume 9, 2015/</span>Project Mailer 2015}}
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{{byline|last=Lucas|first=Gerald R.|abstract=A digital specialist explains the progress that has been made over the past year in digitizing the Mailer canon and various dimensions of scholarship and research.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr15luca}}

Since I began attending the conference of the Norman Mailer Society in 2006, I have been interested in two seemingly separate areas of teaching and scholarship. “Mailer Studies” in a traditional academic sense, and digital culture’s influence on the Humanities have been my primary research interests. While I have addressed both in conference presentations, journal articles, and course offerings, Phillip Sipiora’s 2012 paper on the “legacy power” of Norman Mailer inspired me to combine my two interests.

“Project Mailer” (PM), a Digital Humanities (DH) project that I outlined at the 2014 conference of the Norman Mailer Society, has begun modestly. This year has seen the start of ''[[The Mailer Review]]''’s online presence; two informal sister publications: “Norman Mailer” and “Teaching Norman Mailer”; the NMS Podcast; a renewed emphasis on the Society’s social media presence; and the digital publication of the “Works” section of ''[[Norman Mailer: Works and Days]]''. In addition, the Project Mailer web site has been designed to act as a hub to support new projects undertaken by the Mailer community. Three strategies provide the foundation for the design of PM: the project should be

* as future-proof as possible — i.e., employ the most current strategies for coding, digitization of artifacts, archiving, and accessing content;
* simple and elegant, providing easy and unrestricted access to those who most need it; and
* natively digital — not bogged down with the remnants of a print paradigm that do not make sense in a digital one.

Therefore, it seemed the best way to approach the project was to employ a distributed DH model — one that chooses the best platform for the content and makes that content the most accessible for the Society members.