Creating The Waste Land in CheshireMOOn
For this assignment, you will become an expert on a section of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and then, in the MOO, build spaces and/or objects that describe the research you have done.
In order to do this, you will need to become familiar with navigating and creating places and objects in the MOO. The CWRL has materials online to help you do this. A really helpful guide for new MOO users can be found at Pueblo MOO (the parent MOO of Cheshire MOOn). You may also want to check out The Lost Library of MOO, another helpful page of links and information on MOOs. Also, I have posted guides to performing certain operations in MOO-space. Make use of all these resources!
You will also need to carry out fairly extensive research on the poem. In particular, you are trying to illuminate the numerous allusions and references, direct and indirect, that Eliot makes in his poem. To this end, you should make use of the notes Eliot provides, as well as the notes in other editions of the poem (such as the footnotes from the Norton Anthology of English Literature) and in critical treatments of the work. Since there will be many people trying to find the same materials from the library, the relevant texts will be held on same-day reserve at the PCL.
The kinds of "annotations" you create in the MOO will need to be extensive. That is, it won't be enough to say (for example) that the epigram to the poem is taken from Petronius's Satyricon. In addition, you might need to know about the context of the quote within that other work, and about the relationship of the themes of that text and those of Eliot's, as well as possibly other appearances of that relationship in The Waste Land. To express these, you might wish to create a note (a kind of MOO entity) for people to read that describes these things. You might instead want to create an object that will enact these things. Or you might want to create places that will take the reader through a series of stages in a progression of meanings and references. The possibilities are pretty numerous; you will spend some time on the MOO looking at things other people have created to get ideas for your own project.
You will write a brief (200-word) topic proposal for your project to be turned in by 12:00 noon on Friday, April 2, 1999 via email to your instructor (there is no class meeting that day). The purpose of this proposal is to demonstrate that you have explored the MOO sufficiently to understand what kinds of things are possible in it, and that you have thought about and researched the poem sufficiently to have an idea of what you would like to do with your section for the project. If you would like to work collaboratively on the project, that will be okay with me. The only thing I ask that all members of your group meet with me once all together before turning in a topic proposal to discuss my group evaluation procedures.
The project will be due, in final form, on April 16, 1999, at class time. This means that you will have to work on the project either in the CWRL labs during open hours, or through an external connection from another machine. If you work from a non-CWRL machine, you will need to download a copy of Rapscallion (for Macs), or TinkeriView or Pueblo (for PCs), or some other MUD client of your choosing.
The evaluation criteria for this assignment are: