CAT CLAWS workshops are offered at The Hurt Hub@Davidson to help you succeed in both academic and professional endeavors. Workshops are typically 1-2 hours each, free and open to all, and designed to provide space to learn skills in communication, data analysis, new technologies, and computing.
Steve Kaliski, Theatre
The COVID-19 crisis is further solidifying video conferencing as a primary tool for making first impressions, particularly in business settings. In this workshop, Professor Steve Kaliski from the Theatre Department will share a number of tips on how to optimize the human performance element—how to warm up, how to create the perfect visual composition, how to “make eye contact”—so that the next time you have a high stakes job interview or presentation online, you feel truly empowered to act.
Laurie Heyer, Math & Computer Science
Journalists are telling the story of the COVID-19 pandemic with stunningly informative maps and charts. In this interactive workshop, you will learn how to load spreadsheet data into the free and powerful data science software called R, and make your own maps and charts, similar to those you see in the New York Times. No matter what your field of study or work, you can benefit from better charts and graphs!
Pete Benbow, Business Intelligence Programmer & Analyst, T&I
Power BI and Tableau are the two most in-demand tools for analytics and business intelligence. In this session, learn how to connect Tableau Public (free) to your data and build stunning data visualizations.
AFTER THE WORKSHOP: check out this LinkedIn Learning Collection, and download the Exercise file.
Sundi Richard, Assistant Director for Digital Learning
In this introduction to WordPress, we’ll look at the basic building blocks of WordPress, learn how to work with the Gutenberg editor, custom CSS within a theme, and utilize plugins, to make your WordPress site look and function the way you intend. Please come with a WordPress site you want to work on. If you are a Davidson student or faculty member, please check out this documentation on setting up a Davidson Domain, creating a subdomain, and installing WordPress. If you are not a Davidson student or faculty, you can set up a WordPress site at https://wordpress.com/start/user.
Brooklyn Madding, Freelance graphic designer at the Hurt Hub@Davidson
BEFORE THE WORKSHOP: Download the Project Files and install the fonts linked from this workshop guide. Davidson participants, you may activate Adobe Creative Cloud from off campus. Non-Davidson participants need their own licensed or trial version of Adobe Illustrator.
Learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator, by creating a text-based logo and Instagram Stories post. We will cover the basics of setting up documents, how to use fundamental drawing and editing features, and dive into some tricks, tips and fun ways to make the most of the program. No previous Illustrator experience is required.
Mark Sample, Digital Studies
Twine is an open-source tool for creating interactive, branching-path narratives. It’s a popular game development platform in the indie game community, and easy to learn, even with no programming experience. This introduction will teach you everything you need to know to get started with this exciting digital storytelling tool. To see examples of Twine in action, check out Cactus Blue Motel or scarfmemory. And if you have a lot of time on your hands, play Will Not Let Me Go.
Kevin Smith, Biology
Do you need basic Excel skills for a class, for a current job, for the job you want in your future? Come learn the skills you need to get started working in Excel. Dr. Kevin Smith will lead this beginners’ bootcamp for students, staff, faculty and community members.
No previous experience required — this workshop is for beginners — but some preparation is required.
Topics Include:
Connyre and Chelsie Corbett
Corvos Labs, based at the Hurt Hub@Davidson
Do you need to build a web page from scratch, for yourself or a client? Our instructors will share a simplified process that will help you move from idea to implementation, using best practices in design and user experience. Get hands on experience in wireframing and writing copy for a website. No prior tech or website experience is required. We’ll help you get started!
Pete Benbow, Business Intelligence Programmer & Analyst, T&I
Davidson participants can sign up for Power BI free account using Davidson.edu credentials: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-self-service-signup-for-power-bi. Others need their own Power BI account.
Power BI and Tableau are the two most in-demand tools for analytics and business intelligence. In this session, learn how you can use a free Power BI account to create interactive data visualizations in your web browser and share them with the world.
Raghu Ramanujan, Math & Computer Science
To efficiently collect and manipulate online information, you need to “scrape the web” with a computer program. The Python programming language provides tools for scraping information from the Internet using the Beautiful Soup package. And some sites make it even easier for programmers to grab data using an API (Application Programmer Interface). You’ll learn both of these tools in this workshop taught by Dr. Ramanujan. No previous programming experience is necessary.
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