Elevator speeches are a problem for me, because when I get passionate I just start talking really fast and can go on and on until someone finally tells me to shut up. This makes elevator speeches problematic since they need to get the point across in around a minute. To fit all of my research and all of this program into a minute or less is an art form that I have not quite perfected yet, but well on my way to working on it.
I suppose it would start with a greeting like “Hi, my name is Julia Wall.” And maybe if the person I was talking to did not know me “I am a sophomore at Gettysburg College.” And maybe, if I had time, I would say my major and minor. But I think that’s getting a bit ahead of myself.
“Hi my name is Julia Wall, I am a history major, Civil War Era Studies minor at Gettysburg college. This summer I have been working in my college’s library on a digital humanities project, basically a more interactive digital form of humanities. My project is about the West Point Class of June 1861 and their involvement in the Civil War. I am basing my research off of a yearbook of one of the cadets in Special Collections and researching what happened to each cadet based on West Point cadet registers, the War of Rebellion Records, and the cadet’s annotations in the yearbook. I have an interactive timeline for each cadet and an interactive map that shows where each cadet went during the course of the Civil War. My project is all about the relationships that all these cadets formed at West Point, I am visualizing their journey and their lives.
Well since I am very proud of my project I would want to and am going to share it with everyone. Basically for months after this project and when everyone asks me about how my summer was and how I spent my summer I will go into my elevator speech and try to convey the importance of my project and of Digital Humanities/Scholarship. I have already practiced my elevator speech many times over, not just in the library or to school faculty, but just to people in town. I love these cadets and I am so passionate about this project that I don’t think I could shut up about it.
An audience that would probably be interested in my project and research would be the Civil War community. People that I would talk to from the Civil War community would probably have more interest and more questions about my research and findings so I would probably get more time to talk about what I have done. I would also probably personalize it and relate it to John Bachelder’s history of the battle of Gettysburg. Because it was basically just a compilation of reports right now, my next step in the project is to personalize it and make conclusions, but for now it is what it is and I will try to keep it at 2 minutes or less.
-Julia
