Spinning Thomas Hardy Into the Web

or,

The Genesis of The Thomas Hardy Miscellany

     Two years ago the school where I teach created a node on the World Wide Web. Cyberland was upon us, yet I, a confirmed Luddite, wanted nothing whatever to do with it. Except that I'm not exactly a confirmed Luddite; my confirmation lasts just until I actually try out a new bit of technology and discover a use for it. Then I become a wild-eyed prophet of the New Way.

      I happen to be a fan of the British author Thomas Hardy. I've visited Hardy's Wessex country several times, returning with scores of photographs of locales from his novels, which I use in my classes. I've presented a short but frivolous paper on Hardy and hymn-singing at the biannual Thomas Hardy Conference in Dorchester. So -- although I didn't know it -- I was fully set up for a plunge into cyberspace when last fall one of my Net-wise English Department colleagues, Paul Kalkstein, asked, "Why don't you build a Thomas Hardy web site?"

     "I don't know how."

     "We'll get you a kid."

     That's how you do it, you know. You get a kid. Kids know more about computers and webs and links and all than you or I ever will. The technology is at their fingertips. They just don't know what to do with it.

     My kid turned out to be Sam Antonaccio. Sam is an example of why I love to teach at my school. He is the son of an Italian-American father computer programmer and a Thai mother Southeast Asian restaurateur. He is a bright enthusiastic ninth-grader with wide expressive eyes and a smile that breaks over his face like Hale-Bopp across the starry sky.

     The first day we met in the school's computer center so he could introduce me to the Internet. He helped me locate some other sites dedicated to Thomas Hardy. Then he took me on a brief tour of some of his favorites. "This is the Pepsi web site," he said as we regarded flashing neon bright bebop colors dancing around the screen. "It's pretty cool. Here's where you can chat with a different rock star each week. Do you want a chat room for Thomas Hardy fans?"

     "I don't think so," I said weakly.

      After a while Sam helped me work out what I did want: an album of photographs of Hardy's novels, another of his life, a section for a journal or miscellany (where I could publish poems, reviews, articles -- perhaps including some of my hymn-singing material), a section for information. The whole site would solicit material from other Hardy enthusiasts, so there had to be e-mail access to me. I scrawled out the specs. "Oh, and Sam? Can we make it fairly restrained? Hardy fans tend to be rather a bunch of fuds."

     "No problem." He paused. "Oh, yeah. You'll want some links to the other Hardy sites, too," he added. "Then people who visit your site can click to the others."

     "We can do that?"

     He showed no impatience, no condescension, only enthusiasm. "Oh, sure," he said with that wonderful smile.

     After Christmas vacation Sam directed me to his personal web site. There I found a template that he had built with his own HTML (the computer code of the Internet) editor: "Thomas Hardy Miscellany," with a dummy photograph and paragraphs of text that read:

      "BLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAHBLAH...."

     He had built a table of contents that were linked, so that when I clicked on them I was brought to other dummy pages, on which my photographs of the novels could be placed. There was a list of all the novels I had scrawled out for him, including Tess of the Dumbervilles. Best of all, there was a gorgeous background Sam had designed, gray textured with tiny white strokes.

     My school had provided me with a computer and necessary programs to develop my project, so Sam and I moved his work onto "my" computer, where I could refine the dummy into the real thing. At the school, too, I was given access to scanners and audio equipment and the like so I could enter my photographs and music. Early in January I was installed in a small computer-filled room in the English building with my dummy of The Thomas Hardy Miscellany.

     The next steps were mine, and they took a lot of time. I had to learn how to enter text into HTML, how to scan photographs, how to format music, how to build links, how to make and manipulate tables so I could arrange all the material. Sam's first HTML editor wasn't very good -- it used lots of nested code -- and as I began playing with the pages, some of them exploded, pushing pictures off the screen. He helped me get a new editor to revise some of the pages, and I learned to simplify some others, and gradually the site took shape. Sam would check in with me from time to time and occasionally help me do something, create a "gif," which is a graphic design for a particular job on the page -- an e-mail icon, say. I also began to rely heavily on Paul Kalkstein, my liaison to the "spiders," as members of the committee that controls the school's web site are called.

     One day, after I had at last set up a series of real "Thomas Hardy Miscellany" pages -- photographs of Bathsheba Everdene's manor house in Weatherbury and of Michael Henchard's house in Casterbridge and so on -- all linked together, I looked out of my computer nook and saw Sam heading to his English class. I hadn't seen him in several weeks, and in the meantime I had made some progress. "Sam," I called. "Come here. Look." I clicked on a novel title, and a new page of photographs flashed up. Then I clicked on one of the photographs. "Look." A large version of the image appeared. Then I clicked on the word "here" and the smaller images reappeared. I looked up at him.

     The eyes widened almost to the edge of disbelief, the smile grew vast, and he said, with both joy and obvious pride in what he had helped create, "You have amazed me."