Office Hours

Giselle Kowalski:
Hi everybody, my name is Giselle Kowalski, and I'm the digital marketing strategist here at Texas State University. You're listening to Office Hours, and today I'm here with Sam. Sam, what's up?

Sam Nieves:
Hey, how you doing?

Giselle Kowalski:
I'm good. How are you?

Sam Nieves:
Good, good, good.

Giselle Kowalski:
So what was your biggest takeaway from talking with Dr. Carter?

Sam Nieves:
I learned that he was an undecided major and he went on to be a professor now, and I think that's pretty cool. He went from not knowing to learning on the way what he wanted to do, and now he's doing it really well, so that's pretty cool.

Giselle Kowalski:
Yeah, it's a really good story. Yeah. So we hope you guys enjoy this conversation between Sam and Dr. Daniel Carter.

Sam Nieves:
Start off, can you tell me your name, what you teach, and how long have you been here at Texas State University?

Daniel Carter:
I'm Daniel Carter. I teach Data Journalism and Web Design and Graphic Design, more generally. And I've been at Texas State for six years, I believe, but I'm not totally sure.

Sam Nieves:
All right, so everyone loves a good icebreaker. What would the title of this chapter of your life be called? Oh, to make it easier, I'll say mine. "I don't know what I'm doing right now." That's a good chapter. I think that's a good name.

Daniel Carter:
What about like "I know what I'm doing right now, but I don't know what I'll be doing later."

Sam Nieves:
Oh, that's great. That's a good one. That's good. That's good.

Daniel Carter:
It's a little long, but-

Sam Nieves:
No, no, I mean there's no length restriction on titles. Where are you from originally?

Daniel Carter:
I grew up in Dickinson, Texas, which is right between Houston and Galveston.

Sam Nieves:
I'm from La Porte. Do you know where that is?

Daniel Carter:
I do know where La Porte is. Yeah.

Sam Nieves:
No way. So Dickinson High School and everything. Go Gators.

Daniel Carter:
Dickinson High School. Go Gators. Yeah.

Sam Nieves:
Yeah. Go Gators. Cool. And what was it like growing up there?

Daniel Carter:
I mean, it felt normal. I think it was a good place to grow up. You're outside of Houston, but you're not in a suburb. In Dickinson, it's its own weird little place. Has weird old NASA connections. There's a bunch of old NASA people kicking around Dickinson and probably around La Porte and that whole area, at the same time it's not Houston, and Houston's pretty cool, so I feel like I missed out on things by not being in Houston and being kind of sheltered. You're kind of sheltered in Dickinson. Did you feel that way?

Sam Nieves:
I feel very sheltered, mostly because exactly you're in Houston but you're not in Houston, so it's kind of like a weird thing. But then when you go out into the world they're like, "Hey, where are you from?" I'm like, "Houston." But you never really had that original, authentic Houston experience because you're so close to the coast.

Daniel Carter:
And kids who grew up in Houston, I don't know, I feel like they got exposed to a lot more than we did. I got to college, I was like, "Oh, I'm not from a city actually, and y'all know things I don't."

Sam Nieves:
Yeah, it definitely feels like that. What was your first job?

Daniel Carter:
Actually, I worked at Cinemark as a projectionist.

Sam Nieves:
Really?

Daniel Carter:
The summer of 2002. So the first "Fast and the Furious" movie came out.

Sam Nieves:
That's a good one.

Daniel Carter:
"Pearl Harbor" came out, that was like three hours long.

Sam Nieves:
That was long.

Daniel Carter:
Yeah, it was terrible. But those were the notable films that summer.

Sam Nieves:
Where did you go for your undergraduate?

Daniel Carter:
I went to UT.

Sam Nieves:
UT? OK. What did you major in at UT?

Daniel Carter:
So I had no idea what I wanted to do, and they have a degree that's just called Interdisciplinary Honors, and I did that, and I should have double majored. Everybody else double majored, but I didn't. I wrote fiction and didn't really know what I wanted to do. So I finished up at UT and I worked for a couple years and then I went and got my master's at Ohio State, and my master's is in English literature, but I hung out a lot with the MFA people. And yeah, started writing there and was doing that for a while.

Sam Nieves:
What made you go out and venture into writing your own works?

Daniel Carter:
So I'd always written, I wrote it when I was at UT. I didn't write poetry until I got to Ohio State. And I think it was just being around people who were doing it and realizing that I enjoyed that form.

Sam Nieves:
Could you speak on your experience at the Ohio State University?

Daniel Carter:
It was great. I really liked Ohio State. I really liked Columbus a lot. Getting a master's is good. It was two years where I read books and wrote and had a really good community of friends around me who were doing the same things, and you make no money, but that's OK because you're young and Columbus is cheap, and it was a fun few years. Yeah.

Sam Nieves:
Do you remember any noticeable challenges?

Daniel Carter:
I mean, I was a terrible teacher. I didn't quite understand that I was a terrible teacher at the time, but Ohio State does this weird thing where they throw the master's students into being the primary instructor of composition classes. So I had never taken a composition class in my life and was teaching composition to 20 undergrads. Yeah, I wasn't a good teacher. That's just how that was. I wasn't terrible, but I could have been much better.

Sam Nieves:
Where was it in that experience where you were like, "Well, this is what I want to do, continuing on."

Daniel Carter:
I mean, I enjoyed it. I've always enjoyed talking to students and I've always enjoyed working with students. And I think I enjoyed that even then. I liked going to class, I liked talking to students in class. The decision to do that more seemed, that was part of the decision at least, it wasn't the whole decision, but it was part of it.

Sam Nieves:
I want to know, what has it been like because you were going to college around the mid-2000s in that time at the beginning, that's when Facebook and companies like Twitter and Instagram start popping up. What was it like starting from when there was really no social media presence at all, until now, where you're now teaching and now social media is really what rules the world. How have you seen that change?

Daniel Carter:
I like that question. I think I was in undergrad when people started using Facebook, and when I got to undergrad we were using MySpace. MySpace actually felt like a way that you were going to find people and meet people, because it was so much smaller then, so you could kind of be like, "Oh, that's the person I saw at that party." And it felt very different, much more kind of personal and small. So that was early 2000s and Austin was the end of Austin being a small place. So I'm doing a lot of social media kind of promotion stuff lately. I hate parts of it. And what I hate about it is that it is constant labor. It's like you all do social media stuff. You are constantly pumping out more things because you just have to constantly fill the channel with stuff. And the stuff that we're having to pump out is becoming more media rich.
Where now, OK, Reels do better on Instagram, so you're making videos, I imagine you all are constantly making videos and it's really, really laborious. Whereas if you wanted to promote something or tell people about something in the early 2000s, but even more so in the time period before that, you made a flyer, and that's a piece of paper, and you only made one. You didn't have to make a new flyer every day to keep people's attention. That's something I find really difficult about the current landscape. It's exhausting. It's absolutely exhausting. And I don't know, I like making fewer things that I care more about.

Sam Nieves:
So what do you see the future when it comes to digital humanities as a whole? What do you see that playing out into?

Daniel Carter:
That's a big question. I don't know. I have no idea. I think that it depends on the business models. I think the business models kind of drive what happens on social media. So we understand how Instagram's business model works and then why we, for example, have to pump out constant content on it, or have to pump out Reels instead of photos, or photos instead of little bits of text. Yeah, I don't know. I don't do very much on social anymore at all because I find it a little exhausting, a little boring. I don't know. And I know what I would like is smaller communities with people that I am more interested in. Whether I think that's going to happen, I don't know. I think there's always alternatives. If I was less lazy, I could find that now. I could certainly have that now, but I don't, because we do what's easy and everybody is on Instagram and that's a huge value. Right?

Sam Nieves:
Now I want to talk more about you on the teaching side. What lessons, teaching coding and data journalism, what have you learned that you can apply into your daily life?

Daniel Carter:
My daily life? Let's see. Anytime that you're doing something, document it, so you can do it again. Be really organized. Your computer will always crash, so try your best to figure out a way to back it up in a way that is good for you and easy. Reuse everything. So I'm thinking even about this fall, I'm going to be teaching Design and Data Journalism again. How much of that can I record as I'm teaching and make available so that I can give it to students afterwards? And then I think also understand that even if you do all of those things, you will just redo them for the rest of your life. Because you will never get it actually right. There is no perfect. My Ph.D. is in information science, so I think a lot about how to organize files and how to organize information so that it can be used. It's a never-ending process. You'll just do it over and over again. There's no perfect solution.

Sam Nieves:
Do you have any memorable experiences you're teaching?

Daniel Carter:
Yeah, let me think. So I'm running this thing right now called Texas Community Health News and we have been able to hire quite a few interns this summer. And so I have three of my former students that are interning for me right now. So it's nice to see them get to start doing professional level work in data journalism. I don't know, it's always nice in data journalism, when I see a student find something that we didn't know. What's cool about data journalism is we can find stuff that we didn't know. And I had a student pull the maintenance and cleanup records for parks in Austin, because they wanted to know about graffiti cleanup, and I thought that was cool. Right? That's something we don't know anything about graffiti cleanup in Austin or how much they spend cleaning up graffiti or anything like that. And now we know something about it. I don't know, that's kind of rare in university that we get to actually go out and find something new at the undergraduate level.

Sam Nieves:
You probably have to dig deep for that one.

Daniel Carter:
But less deep than you would think. You send an email, you say, "I want this." And then you get it. And that's kind of a cool thing.

Sam Nieves:
That's pretty cool about now, you can just send emails like, "Hey." Did you expect your life to be what it is like today?

Daniel Carter:
Did I expect my life to be what it was like today? God, I had no idea what I was going to do. No, but I think I'd be happy. I think I'd be happy with this. I think I knew I wanted to be a professor and I got really lucky there and it worked out. Did I think I was going to be in San Marcos? No, but it's good here. It's a lot better than a lot of places I could have been. So-

Sam Nieves:
All right. Yeah. Yeah. And so if you could go back and meet that college you, what would you tell him?

Daniel Carter:
Oh, study harder, have more fun. Do both. Yeah. I wish I had double majored. I wish that I had majored in something just that I would've liked to have known about, I don't know, economics or sociology or anything because I could have done that. I just would've had to work harder and I didn't want to work hard at that point. And then have more fun. It's good to be young. Have as much fun as you can.

Sam Nieves:
Finally, I want to ask you. If there's any advice that you could give me, me as a junior right now, just any general advice that you'd have for me.

Daniel Carter:
Yeah. You're making films. Make films that you love. Work hard on it, be hard on yourself. Right? Have fun making them. But now is one of the only chances you'll have to really make what you want to make and figure out what you want to make and what you like. And you're also at a point where there's in some ways less pressure on you. So you can be a lot more experimental when you're young, because you're doing different things with your films. So you can really figure out what you want to do or you can try weirder stuff or you can be influenced by weirder people. And I think that's what you should be doing. Make stuff that you love and let yourself have a rein on it.

Sam Nieves:
All right. Well, thank you.

Daniel Carter:
Yeah, thank you. It's fun.

Sam Nieves:
Thank you so much.

Daniel Carter:
Yeah, I appreciate it.

Sam Nieves:
Thank you for listening to this episode of Office Hours. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. And make sure to tune in next time to learn more about the experiences of our amazing Texas State faculty. Remember to follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube at TXST. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State University Network represent the views of the host and guest, not of Texas State University. Once again, I'm Sam, and I'll see you all next time. Take care.