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How Duke Welcomed the Class of 2022

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

When the early decision deadline was approaching, Duke’s communications team asked me to come up with an idea to welcome the class in a friendly, fun way. I spent hours on Youtube watching other admissions videos, figuring out if there was a perfect recipe to get people excited for a school I already loved so much. It seemed impossible to nail down a video – there were so many different videos online, I had no idea how to replicate.

I realized, though, that I shouldn’t be replicating – that different videos reflected schools’ personalities. The engineering schools boasted crazy tech videos. At arts schools, dancers leaped across the screen in perfect pirouettes.

 

But, Duke has a little bit of everything. So what makes us different?

 

I thought back to why I came to Duke in the first place. And it clicked – it was the people.

It was this beautiful sense of community that drew me into Duke in the first place, that embraced me with open arms, that made my first moments on campus feel like I was sliding into a warm, comfy sweater that I had owned my whole life. And it’s this sense of community that makes Duke different than any other school out there.

I wanted to capture that in a video. A video that screamed at new students, “Hello!  This is what you get at Duke. You get these people, this family. And you’re going to love it!”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bcs7ZngDahk/?taken-by=dukeuniversity

There started my week of walking around campus with my camera. I’d see my friends, and before they could even say hello to me, I’d ask, “Hey, could I borrow you for a second? Could you just say ‘Welcome to Duke’ on camera for me?”’ Their eyebrows would initially furrow, but the look of confusion would be replaced in seconds by a look of genuine happiness, often excitement. “Of course,” almost every person would echo back to me as they got ready for their closeup.

And that’s the beauty of media, especially social media. Sure, social media lets us connect with old friends and new friends, share spring break pictures and tweet funny jokes for friends, but at the crux of it all, it’s about people connecting with people. This video not only gave me an opportunity to connect with the incoming students but also created a bridge for new students to connect with each other and their future home.

 

Challenges

Getting people to participate was, like I said, easy – everyone wanted to welcome new students. The editing, however, proved time-consuming, and I worked on the video over the course of two weeks. My two major challenges:  

  1. Music. For making videos, sometimes half the battle is finding the right music for the background. The music has to match the mood, or else, one risks ruining a video. Finding music that encompassed this “Welcome” vibe was harder than I thought – I spent an hour listening to different instrumentals on Youtube before I found something that worked. Everything else was too cheesy, too intense, too fast, too slow, etc.                                    
  2. Multiple shots in a frame: there were so many shots of people that I could put in the video, I was left wondering, how do I put in as many as possible? This led to me shrinking and stretching the video shots to different sizes, in order to fit more than one shot in a frame. I ended up doing this multiple times in the video because it really emphasized the idea of Duke community. I use Final Cut Pro, and to adjust these shapes I used the Transform tool (circled in yellow). This allowed me to size and move clips accordingly (yellow arrow).

Overall, this video was a blast to make. While some hurdles cost me more time than I expected, the reward was worth it. Getting to play a role in welcoming new students to campus put a smile on my face, as it did with every single person I filmed.

Welcome, class of 2022 – see you soon.

The Complications of 360 Degree Video

Before shooting with a 360-degree camera, I really had no clue what to expect. I didn’t know what the camera was going to look like, how it was going to work, or even how I was going to hold it. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on cameras. Am I even going to be able to use this thing?” My first experience with a 360-degree camera was nearly a year and a half ago. I was privileged to be tasked with shooting footage of the Brodhead Center and thus, learning how to use a 360-degree camera. The problem is, as I said, that was over a year and a half ago and I haven’t touched the camera since. After my first shoot, I could successfully answer those questions that I previously had to ask myself. Now, I can barely even remember what the camera looks like, let alone how to use it. And so, with the new duty of filming the extravagant Trinity House, I was once again tasked with learning the ins and the outs of the 360-degree camera. Lucky for me, one thing that I do remember is that the camera itself was not that difficult to use. The application, on the other hand, is quite the burden.

The main problem wasn’t the camera itself. The camera that I was using was the Nikon KeyMission 360. It looks like a fist-sized cube and has two curved lenses and image sensors to capture footage from the front and from the back. If I’m being honest, I couldn’t even tell you which side of the camera is the front and which was the back. It has almost perfect symmetry. The directions appeared fairly simple. While the camera was off, it said to hold down the button on the top until the lights were flashing (to send it into pairing mode) and then connect the camera to your phone via Bluetooth. After pairing, connect to the camera’s wifi network and you should be all set up. Finally, you can use the app to remotely start and stop filming as well as view an in-app gallery of footage taken so far.

Now, let me recall for you my experiences with the camera’s pairing capabilities and use of the application. The day of shooting, one of the other interns (Katie) and I spent nearly 30 minutes just trying to get the camera to pair with our phones so that we could use the application. When we picked up the camera from the Office of News and Communications nearly a week before, we practiced pairing it with our phones to make sure that we knew what we were doing. After following the steps over and over again, for close to 20 minutes, the camera finally paired and we were on our way. We knew that there was a chance of these complications happening again but were just hoping that they wouldn’t arise when it came time to shoot. When we tried this in Trinity, it didn’t pair. We tried for a half hour with no luck. We didn’t think it ever would pair. So, we needed to come up with a workaround.

 

The workaround.

We hadn’t practice filming manually because we knew that if we did it this way, we would not be able to view our footage in real time. The camera doesn’t have a digital screen, thus, the only way to view the footage that you have taken is through the application. But, since the application wasn’t working, we had to just go for it. We started filming. We weren’t sure if we were actually capturing any footage because neither of us had tried manually shooting footage with this type of camera before, but had to go for it anyway because it was our only option. Then we realized, “the camera must have an SD card!” For those of you who don’t know what an SD card is, its basically a memory card used in portable devices such as cameras. So, we plugged it into a computer and viewed the gallery of footage. It was working! We were actually capturing footage. Now that we could finally see what we were recording, we wanted to make sure that the footage was visually pleasing. I’ll get into how we shot in a bit, but (through examining the footage) we basically realized that the tripod that the camera was on was sitting too low and needed to be raised.

Without the convenience of the app, we didn’t know whether or not we were getting footage. Even if we were, we didn’t know what it looked like. Eventually coming to the conclusion that the tripod needed to be raised became much more difficult and time-consuming than it needed to be. Although the camera’s specs and shooting capabilities are great (it shoots 360-degree 4K Ultra HD video), due to the inconsistencies and problematic nature of its ability to pair to your phone, I would not recommend it as the top choice for 360-degree video.

 

How we shot.

There were a few approaches to filming that Katie and I could have taken. The first was that we could walk around Trinity with the camera on an attachment and film the dorm as one continuous shot. There were a few problems with this option. The first is there would be a person, relatively close to the camera, in the frame at all times. This would take up a lot of space in the film. Also, if we were walking, there would be a lot of twists and turns trying to navigate around the dorm. If the camera is twisting, that defeats the purpose of the 360-degree video because viewers are supposed to have the freedom of doing this on their own. Lastly, although the dorm is glamorous, not all of it needs to be seen. There are some highlights such as the game room, common rooms, and movie theater, but we really didn’t think that people would care about the hallways and stairwells. To get from one noteworthy place to the next, we would need to pass through these boring places that would make the video long and drawn-out.

The second option was to set the camera down on a tripod, start filming, step out of the frame, leave the camera there for 10-20, and then come back in and stop filming. For the final video, we would then edit the parts with us in them out and stitch together this footage. This is the choice that we decided to go with. It would allow us to present the glorified parts of Trinity House and give the viewer enough time to pan around each room, all while leaving out the uninteresting aspects of the dorm.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

One of our social media secret weapons is the online tool Canva, especially since the advent of Instagram Stories last year. Our office relies pretty heavily upon the tool for stylized, easy to build graphics, and now, animated video content as well.

I recently had the opportunity to demo the new Canva beta animations tool on Duke’s Instagram Stories to highlight a very exciting partnership between the university and the American Ballet Theatre.

Canva is a great tool if you’ve got really visual content to accompany any text about your story or research that you want to highlight. In this case, we were fortunate to have some incredible dance photos at our disposal. I knew I wanted to highlight these images and push people to the story via Instagram Stories.

Enter, Canva. The great thing about this tool is its user-friendliness. I was able to login to our office account and design slides using photos and text, just as I would ordinarily. The difference comes in when it is time to export your slides. You’ll notice that there is a new option under “Download” in the top, right navigation bar. Select this new option, “Animated GIF/Movie,” then click “Preview Animation.”

 

This will open the Animator tool:

From here, you can select from any of the six options or “styles” on the right for your animations, which will be demoed on the slides you have created. Once you are satisfied with your selected animation form, you have the option to download them as either a GIF or .mp4 file. For example, @DukeUEnergy recently used the tool to create a GIF that they rolled out on Twitter:

 

For the purpose of our Instagram Stories, I selected “Download as Movie.”  Then the file will be downloaded to your computer. Here is our final product:

 

We’re not quite done yet. Because all four slides were created in one Canva document and not individually downloaded, they exported into one, 28-second long video. Instagram Stories will only allow 10-second long clips for each part of the story. So I had to do a bit of tedious editing on my end. First, I emailed the .mp4 file to my iPhone. Then, I went into my camera roll and edited the whole video down into separate clips featuring each slide. I saved each edited segment as a new video file, so as not to lose the original 28-second video. The end result was 4, 7-10 second long videos featuring only one of each of the animated slides. I was then able to upload these, in order, to our Instagram Stories.

The result when it played back was one seamless “video” on our Stories. With the video broken into 4 separate parts, I was also able to attach a link on to each segment of our Story that sent viewers directly to the Duke Today article about the partnership. The end result can be viewed on Instagram’s mobile interface as a feature on @DukeUniversity‘s account.

This whole process took me less than an hour. With a little creativity to work around the Stories time limit function, Canva Animator is a really great tool to easily make videos with a highly produced feel with (very little, at least on my part) video skill.

Animoji in Motion: How Duke Announced the 2018 Commencement Speaker

Commencement season is one of my favorite parts of working in higher ed communications. Gearing up to send a fresh batch of Dukies out into the world, all glowing with accomplishment and brimming with promise, makes for a lot of work and long days, but is one of the most personally gratifying projects I work on each year.

And when your boss hands down the task of coming up with an innovative new way to announce this year’s commencement speaker, it’s time to get pretty creative. After all, we announce a commencement speaker every year, and we’ve done it the same way for as long as anyone can remember. But at Duke, we like to think of ourselves as “big idea people.” We aim for the Pie In The Sky and see where we land. We’re also fortunate to have an extremely supportive team of leaders who encourage us to think BIG and run with it. And this time we really went for it.

We learned that Apple CEO Tim Cook would be this year’s commencement speaker only a few weeks after the launch of the iPhone X, which gave Apple’s jazzy Animoji ads just enough time to make the rounds on social media. In our team’s brainstorming meeting, I threw out the idea of making something similar to announce Cook as this year’s speaker and things snowballed from there into the end result: two students and Duke President Vincent Price – and their Animojis – introducing Cook as our commencement speaker.

We could have rolled the video on our social channels and left it at that, but since we really wanted to make a splash with the students, we arranged to have the video on the jumbotron at Cameron Indoor Stadium during a Duke men’s basketball game.  And the reaction was better than we could have ever hoped for.

What everyone didn’t see was the weeks of hard work and late nights that went into making this project. Here’s a look at some of the behind-the-scenes work (and play) that made the magic happen:

Duke’s Director of Social Media & Content Strategy, Sonja Foust, playing guinea pig for our lighting test.

Sanford School of Public Policy MPP candidate Kavya Sakar films with her Animoji.

Senior Matthew King during filming.

Really testing out that facial recognition software.

Even Duke’s President Vincent Price was game.  Behold, a series:

And here’s a look at how those of us not lucky enough to be designated as “talent” spent the day:

Special thanks to our hosts for the day of filming in Blue Devil Tower, Chad Lampman, Executive Director of the Blue Devil Network.

Kristen Brown, AVP of News, Communications & Media, gives the Animojis a try in between filming. We’re big fans of the bunny.

Taking my job as Chief Fly Away Wrangler v seriously.

Me (appalled at how we are STILL in the studio some 9 hours later) along with Duke’s AVP of News & Global Communications, Laura Brinn, and VP for Public Affairs and Government Relations, Mike Schoenfeld, who loved watching the process from the monitors as President Price recorded his lines.

 

 

 

Medium: An Explainer on a New Platform for Duke University

What is it?
Medium is a blogging platform started by the founder of Blogger and Twitter. It is a place to write and publish. It’s also super easy to use and edit.

How it works.
Anyone can start a free account and start publishing their writing. Writers can publish to their own profiles, or they can publish their writing on publications. Writers can create their own publications and/or contribute to publications that curate stories. Medium has an existing network of writers, so communities form easily and writers can follow each other’s work.

You can find and follow people and publications using Medium’s search. Comments in Medium are left in the margins, which is a great way to create an interactive reading experience. You can also recommend articles that you like.

Screen Shot 2016-08-16 at 11.03.25 AM

Content.
Medium is wide-open as far as topics. Writers publish both short-form and long-form and stories vary in tone, format and topic. You can insert photos and videos in a Medium story to make it more visually compelling.

Audience.
Writers and readers on Medium vary. Some are bloggers and journalists. Some are experts on
a certain thing. And some are just curious people who want to tell their stories.

A full 95% of Medium‘s readers are college graduates, and 43% of them earn six figures or more. Even better, from an advertiser standpoint, these readers are also young, with half of them in the coveted 18-34 demographic and 70% of them being under the age of 50.  — From this article.

32% of Medium readers are from the United States, followed by 12% from India, and a combined 14% from the UK/Germany/France. — From Alexa.

People and Publications to Follow.

And its users are some heavy hitters: The Gates Foundation uses Medium to post updates on the latest charity work. The White House posted the State of the Union address on Medium ahead of the event. Google (GOOG) just started using the service to promote its “Ideas” blog. — From CNN

Here are some of my current favorite Medium publications:

Should you use Medium?
Are you just getting started with a blog? Medium has a huge built-in audience.
Are you new to blogging? Medium is really easy to use.
Are you looking to get more readers on what you are already writing? Medium might make sense for you to use in addition to op-eds and existing blogs you are publishing.

How are Duke people using Medium?
There are a handful of Duke professors who publish their opinions and findings to Medium.

Duke University has just launched a publication where we plan to pull in these stories as well
as:

  • Faculty opinion pieces, especially thought-provoking pieces that may not be quite right
    for an op-ed, or that may have missed the short window of the news cycle, but would still be of interest to readers
  • Posts that distill faculty research expertise in a ready-friendly format, such as this post explaining work that was published in 2015 but is relevant to current conversations and political debate
  • First-person essays and posts related to the experiences of students, faculty and staff
  • Institutional opinion or perspective from senior leaders regarding policy issues, current events, or other current topics
Duke University's official publication on Medium

Duke University’s official publication on Medium

Have a Medium account? Let us know by emailing the #DukeSocial team.

More Reading
How to Use Medium: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing, Publishing & Promoting on the Platform, from Hubspot

Medium for Business: The Complete Guide for Marketers, by Social Media Examiner

How to do Medium Well, by News for Authors

Vidcon Recap

sven

I just flew back from VidCon in California… (And boy are my arms tired. No? Ok, moving on.)

For those who haven’t heard of VidCon, it’s sort of the premiere YouTube-and-other-online-video conference. It’s run by Hank and John Green (the VlogBrothers), who pretty much invented modern vlogging.

There are several different tracks. The Community track is the one meant for 12-year-old girls to meet all their favorite YouTube stars. (If you ever want to hear high-pitched screaming—possibly including crying and/or wailing—just get Danisnotonfire to walk into a room full of preteens.) The Creator track is the next tier up, meant for video creators. That’s the one I signed up for. One tier up from the Creator track is the Industry track, meant for big brands and networks. (I wish I’d signed up for that one because it looked like they had some great content. Hindsight.)

I went to a whole bunch of workshops and panels and wanted to share some highlights and tips with you all.

Online Video News

There was a whole panel about news shows on YouTube, featuring panelists from The Young Turks and SourceFed. If you’re not familiar, The Young Turks is a live news show featuring way left-leaning opinionated commentary. SourceFed is a comedy news channel. The discussion centered on what works well on YouTube as opposed to in a traditional journalism setting.

The Young Turks channel in particular relies heavily on the opinions of the anchors. They made the comparison to Jon Stewart (of The Daily Show). He’s the most trusted news media figure out there, according to surveys, and the theory is that it’s because he’s relatable and you know his opinion.

Further discussion centered on making the news format digestible, and working to keep things snappy and fairly short.

SourceFed’s main goal is to walk the line between appropriate and inappropriate humor in news stories that aren’t always funny.

And here’s a tip for scripted shows that I thought was interesting: Sometimes reading off a teleprompter gives you “teleprompter face,” and you’re not as animated. The shortcut is to make sure that your eyebrows are still moving if you’re reading off a teleprompter. It keeps your face animated and engaged.

Video Formats

For news videos, lots of channels are doing round-up style videos, meaning they’ll include 3 or 4 different news stories in one video. When headlining these round-ups, though, they’re still using the catchiest news headline to get the click.

Another interesting item I heard about while I was there was the “elevation” of the daily vlog into more of a filmmaking style. I’m not sure how that would apply to Duke channels, but it’s cool anyway. In particular, check out Emily Diana Ruth’s “Letters to July” to see some examples.

Platforms

There was some mention of Facebook directly uploaded video as opposed to linking to YouTube videos on Facebook. You can see our ONC test results on that here. SourceFed mentioned that they’re exploring 1-minute, 1-take videos specifically for Facebook that are “extra” content beyond their YouTube content. Some were also experimenting with preview cuts for Facebook with direction to watch the full video on YouTube. (This redirection to YouTube is more important for those people who are monetizing YouTube views, and not so much to us in the business of getting as many eyeballs as possible without worrying about monetization.)

There was an entire panel on the different platforms available for online video. Represented were YouTube, Vimeo, Vine and Tumblr. The consensus was that YouTube is great for experimenting with new formats and getting feedback on your videos, and Vimeo is great for premium content, especially with their Vimeo On Demand setup, which allows you to charge people to get your video. The Vine and Tumblr reps didn’t have too much to add to the conversation. The Tumblr guy reiterated that GIFs work great on Tumblr, and if you want people to share your stuff on Tumblr, it probably wouldn’t hurt to make some shareable GIFs of whatever video you’re promoting. And, um, the Vine guy just sort of said, “Yeah man, Vine is cool,” over and over. So do with that what you will.

Music and the Content ID System

I will preface this by saying that everyone who talked about YouTube’s Content ID system at the conference began with, “I am not a lawyer, but…” so I’ll make that same claim. I am not a lawyer, but I learned some things about YouTube’s Content ID system in a panel on music. The panel was specifically about covers, parodies and remixes, but could also apply if you have a music bed in your videos.

Fairly recently, YouTube brokered some deals with the biggest labels in the music industry. Here’s how it works: YouTube’s Content ID system will pick up that you are using someone else’s song in your video and will give you a notice that says it’s someone else’s song. That’s not a bad thing because when you click to acknowledge that, yes, you are using someone else’s song, YouTube automatically begins to skim a percentage off of the ad revenue from that video and funnel it to the record label. The record label wins because they get money, and you win because YouTube lets you leave your video up and no one sues you. Yay.

The caveat here for us as Duke channels is that we’re most likely not monetizing in the first place, so this doesn’t really help us. I would still strongly recommend that everyone use music beds that you have licensed. (You can find lists of sites where you can get licensed tracks in the StyleGuide.) Still, if you’re conferring with students, this information could be helpful.

I went to some other panels, too, about storytelling and camera equipment and filmmaking and YouTube in general and got to meet with a a bunch of Internet-famous people, so if you want to hear more dirt or just chat about YouTube (or Disneyland), drop me a note or give me a call.

Duke Launches New Tumblr: Site uses social media platform to highlight Duke experts

It’s a new website where Dan Ariely discusses the new Apple Pay system, Peter Feaver considers the threat of ISIS, Priscilla Wald asks why Americans are so scared of Ebola and Karla Holloway ponders a post-racial America.

Launched earlier this month, the Duke News Tumblr has begun sharing the views of these and other university experts with journalists and other subscribers. Duke’s Office of News & Communications (ONC) designed the site on the increasingly popular Tumblr platform with rich graphics, video clips and other material.

Other recent posts have focused on fracking, LGBT issues and climate change, as well as on less-publicized topics such as free samples at Costco or California’s plan to ban plastic bags.

tumblrpost

A recent Duke News tumblr post

“Social media keeps growing in importance as a source for how people get their news,” said David Jarmul, associate vice president of news and communications.  “Over the past few years, we’ve shifted our strategies to keep pace on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Now Tumblr is emerging as a player, especially with journalists and young people.”

Duke’s news office remains active on other social networks – more than 240,000 people have “liked” the main Duke Facebook page – and through more conventional approaches such as news releases, research reports, op-ed articles and video stories, as well as the Duke Today website.

“We’re constantly watching our audiences and experimenting with new platforms to reach them,” Jarmul said. “We quietly started our Tumblr a few weeks ago and solicited feedback from Duke alums active in the news media. They offered some excellent suggestions, and we tweaked the site accordingly. Now we plan to reach out to more people who might enjoy the material. Tumblr just keeps getting bigger, especially on mobile devices.”

Danielle Nelson, ONC’s social media fellow, is running the site with Keith Lawrence, ONC’s executive director of news and communications, and Cara Rousseau, its social media manager.

This post was originally published on Duke Today.

How to Enhance Links to Your Webpages in Social Network Shares (Hint: It’s All in the Metadata)

A media-enhanced Twitter link, powered by Twitter Card metadata in the library website.

A media-enhanced Twitter link, powered by Twitter Card metadata in the library website.

We all have great content and we love to see it tweeted, liked, pinned, tumbld, and otherwise shared in whichever social media platforms people fancy. These platforms are all getting smarter, and are increasingly doing more to find and distinguish the truly shareworthy stuff that lives at the other end of those shortened URLs.

With just a few easy additions of code to our sites, we have the power to trigger media-rich shares, including nice photos, accurate attribution, and the text snippets of our choosing. These enhanced links can stand out in a monotonous stream of social media updates, compelling readers to click (and/or re-share), and driving more traffic to our sites.

Here are just a few tips for getting webpages to play nicely when shared via social media. They all require the simple addition of a few <meta> tags in the HTML.

1.  Open Graph tags (for Facebook & More)

Have you ever linked to a webpage in a Facebook post? Facebook selects a default thumbnail image (which might be something irrelevant like a button icon) and what it thinks is a representative snippet of the content you’d like to share. But you don’t have to leave it up to chance. Facebook created the Open Graph protocol as a standard that any social platform can use to give webpage authors the power to remove the guesswork. FB looks for these tags for guidance, and other tools do as well.

2. Twitter Cards (for Twitter)

With its 140-character limit, it can be hard to tweet a link to a page and also find some free characters to attribute the source or provide a taste of the interesting content. Twitter Cards help solve that problem. In the library, we recently added Twitter Card metadata to all of our digital collections and our blogs. Almost instantly, all tweets linking to our pages were enriched, and the change even enhanced previous tweets retroactively.

3. Rich Pins (for Pinterest)

Pinterest is also on board with using page metadata to enrich shares. It currently supports distinct pins for articles, places, products, movies, and recipes.

How to Add Metadata for Social Media Optimization

You probably don’t want to manually add these <meta> tags to every individual page. But chances are, you’re using a CMS like Drupal or WordPress to manage your website, and if so, you’re in luck. These platforms have plugins and modules available that make this setup a cinch:

If you have a sites.duke.edu blog, the WordPress SEO plugin isn’t currently enabled there, but you can request the plugin through this form.

I highly recommend adding this metadata if you can. You could see big improvements in your content’s representation in social media platforms, and it requires only a few simple steps to get it going.

Happy sharing!

Nerdy Holidays For Higher Education

calendar_january_joelanmanSocial media managers are all too familiar with obscure holidays like “Speak Like a Pirate Day” or “National High Five Day.” These dates offer a great opportunity to connect with audiences around a dynamic concept. However, these holidays don’t always mesh with content from colleges and universities. For higher education communicators, I’ve created an intellectual and scholarly (read: nerdy) list of holidays and anniversaries that tap into our expertise.

Let the Duke social media team know how you celebrate these days and suggest additions to the list in the comments section.

 

JANUARY

January 2nd:  Science Fiction Day

January 7th: Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday

January 9: Simone de Beauvoir’s birthday

January 13: “International” Skeptics Day

January 15th: Wikipedia Day

January 18: Thesaurus Day

January 25: Opposite Day

 

FEBRUARY

February 1: Langston Hughes’s birthday

February 7: Charles Dickens’s birthday

February 12: Charles Darwin’s birthday

February 22: World Thinking Day

February 24-28: Fair Use Week (changes every year)

February 27th: John Steinbeck’s birthday

 

MARCH

March 2: Dr. Seuss’s 110th birthday

March 6: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s birthday

March 8: International Women’s Day

March 11: Douglas Adams’ birthday

March 14: Pi Day

March 15: Ides of March

March 25: Tolkien Reading Day

March 31: 125th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower opening

 

APRIL

April 3: Tweed Day

April 13: Scrabble Day

April 16: National Librarian Day (Library Week is April 13-19)

April 22: Earth Day

April 22: Vladimir Nabokov’s 115th birthday

April 25th: DNA day

April 27th: Morse Code Day and Samuel Morse’s birthday

 

MAY

May 5: Soren Kierkegaard’s birthday

May 5: Karl Marx’s birthday

May 6: National Teacher Appreciation Day

May 11: Salvadore Dali’s 110th birthday

May 18: International Museum Day

May 25: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birthday

May 27: 70th anniversary of first performance of “No Exit”

May 30: Walt Whitman’s birthday

 

JUNE

June 5: Frederico Garcia Lorca’s birthday

June 6: 30th Anniversary of the release of Tetris

June 8: 65th Anniversary publishing of “1984”

June 16: Bloomsday / Celebration of James Joyce

June 28: Tau Day (for detractors of Pi Day)

 

JULY

July 3: Franz Kafka’s birthday

July 3: Li Shizhen’s birthday

July 4: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birthday

July 10: Nikola Tesla’s birthday

July 12: Henry David Thoreau’s birthday

July 12: Pablo Neruda’s birthday

July 21: Ernest Hemingway’s 115th birthday

July 29: 60th Anniversary of publication of Lord of the Rings

 

AUGUST

August: National Inventors month

August 1: Anniversary of the first Comic-Con

August 9: P.L. Travers’s birthday (And 2014 is the 80th Anniversary of Mary Poppins)

August 12: Erwin Schrodinger’s birthday

August 13: International Left Handers Day

August 25: 405th anniversary of Galileo’s first telescope demonstration

 

SEPTEMBER

September 13: Programmers Day

September 13: Roald Dahl’s birthday

September 17: 60th Anniversary of publication of Lord of the Flies

September 17th: Constitution Day

September 22: 50th Anniversary of Opening of Fiddler on the Roof

September 24: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday

September 25: Shel Silverstein’s birthday

September 28: Ask a Stupid Question Day

 

OCTOBER

October 7: Anniversary of the invention (patent) of the bar code

October 13: “International” Skeptics Day

October 15: Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birthday

October 16: Dictionary Day,  Noah Webster’s birthday

October 16: Oscar Wilde’s Birthday

October 24: United Nations Day

October 28: 100th birthday of Jonas Salk, inventor of Polio vaccine

October 18: Anniversary of the publication of Moby Dick

 

NOVEMBER

November 6: Chinua Achebe’s birthday

November 7: Albert Camus’s birthday

November 8: Bram Stoker’s birthday

November 9: 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

November 10: 45th anniversary of Sesame Street

November 11: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s birthday

November 13: 5th Anniversary of the discovery of water on the moon

November 22: Evolution Day

November 26: Anniversary of the publication of Alice in Wonderland

November 30: Mark Twain’s birthday

 

DECEMBER

December 1: Anniversary of the first business school (ESCP Europe was established)

December 10: Human Rights Day

December 21: Anniversary of the first crossword puzzle

December 7: Letter Writing Day

December 9: Grace Hopper’s birthday

 

TIP: In addition to these, we suggest asking professors with specific expertise if there are any important dates their fields that they could speak to.

Photo: Creative Commons / joelanman.