Communicating Research

I've always found myself struggling to find an answer when someone asks me, "So, what do you study?" Most of the time, I end up just saying, "Oh, you know, I work on digital preservation." And then whoever asked about it just nods sagely: "That's interesting."

But I'm pretty sure they don't mean it.

We've all heard about the importance of 'elevator speeches,' those 2-5 minute sound bites about you and your work and your purpose in life, but they're awfully tough to put together. And I know I haven't gotten much guidance on it. (Aside from, "Have one.") Even being in an interdisciplinary field and institution, it wasn't until this semester that I've really gotten a taste of how to communicate my research to people who have had no other exposure to it.

I'm in a course now, focusing on data curation, that draws students from the School of Information (my home department), materials science and engineering, bioinformatics, and computer science. While we've done some reading about data curation issues, the focus of the class so far has been on how to talk to one another.

One of the very first classes, we were all given markers. One by one, we each gave an overview of what we're studying; if someone said something you didn't understand, you put your marker down on the table, prompting the speaker to give an explanation. What was remarkable to me was how much of my everyday dialog was foreign to other people in the class. Metadata? Markers down. Archival material? Markers down. You could see the lightbulbs going off as we all realized just how much of our individual scholarly dialects we take for granted.

This experiences adds a new dimension to the communication problem: not only do I have to figure out how to summarize everything I'm working on in a sentence or two, but it's got to be understandable, too!

We're an interdisciplinary group here, and I'm curious to hear your experience. What do you do when someone says, "So, digital humanities. What is that?" Do you have a knock-'em-dead elevator speech? How have you learned to communicate your work and your research, and what things do you struggle with?