August 14, 2014

The Digital Mailer Project

Promoting the Legacy of Norman Mailer: A Prospectus

Imagine a centralized digital repository of full-text editions of all of Norman Mailer’s works — accessible on any device. Imagine a fully searchable database of primary works by Mailer and secondary works by scholars, journalists, and historians. Imagine this collection is fully responsive to users’ needs: timelines show how Mailer’s works fit chronologically into his biography; intertextual references, keywords, and phrases provide visual connections between novels, essays, letters, criticism, film, television, and inter- views; pages display scholarly annotations about key characters and themes in Mailer’s work, emphasizing the community’s ability to add additional multimodal posts, comments, links, and insights about the material. Imagine a digital storehouse containing artifacts of Mailer’s life — a freely accessible digital collection curated by the very people Mailer has influenced with his works. A Digital Mailer Project could carry the name of Mailer into a new digital space: not necessarily a better space than print, but arguably a necessary move to further Mailer’s legacy.

A Digital Mailer Project could provide a solid foundation for augmenting Mailer Studies in the digital age. All of the above is possible with the interest and support of the Mailer community of scholars and aficionados. Having a strong digital presence could mean the difference between obscurity and continued interest in one of the creative geniuses of the twentieth century.

One of the chief characteristics of digital projects is that they are forward-looking. The Digital Humanities aim to maintain the rigors of traditional textual analysis by bringing artifacts into digital environments, thus creating something new, participatory, and multimodal. With the DMP, Norman Mailer could be one of the first 20th-century literary figures to have such a presence in digital form. This should keep Mailer and his work relevant as more of us define our lives by digital pursuits. With the support of stakeholders, the legacy of Norman Mailer could achieve a new longevity and relevance in the digital age, building on the renewed interest in Mailer Studies in the wake of the recent publications of Norman Mailer: A Double Life, The Mind of an Outlaw, and The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. Now is the time to begin the Digital Mailer Project.

What follows is a proposal for the foundation of the Digital Mailer Project (DMP). Hopefully, it will convince you — members of the Norman Mailer Society’s Executive Board and general membership — to support this project in two ways: (1) by giving the Society’s imprimatur, and (2) by agreeing to contribute to the project’s future growth and support. The DMP could lay the foundation for a vast, accessible, and ever-expanding digital collection centered on Norman Mailer’s life and work. With your support, this could be a real possibility. While this proposal is more modest in scope than the examples above, it would provide a solid foundation for realizing a central, digital repository that would support Mailer Studies into the future.

Rationale

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, 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.

This document proposes the DMP to the Norman Mailer Society for consideration. It seeks to secure the Society’s approval and cooperation for contributions; e.g. perhaps as an extension of The Mailer Review, for the re-publication of monographs, or original research projects. It covers:

• A brief introduction to DH;
• A detailed overview of the DMP, including a review of similar projects already completed, detailing goals, standards, methodology, and approach;
• A proposed timeline for project milestones;
• A call eliciting participation from the community;
• An estimate of long-term, practical logistics such as personnel, equipment needs, costs, hosting, and coding;
• A consideration of potential challenges the project could face.

The Digital Humanities

Both an emerging discipline and a practice, the Digital Humanities (DH) brings the artifacts of pre-digital culture into the digital age and builds new interfaces for understanding these artifacts. It combines textual criticism with data analysis to produce new insights and understanding. For example, DH projects might be as simple as curated collections of searchable primary documents and multimedia; employ meta content to

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