Could Cambridge Analytica Have Delivered Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Victory? An Anthropologist’s Look at Big Data and Political Campaigning

I first provide some context about Cambridge Analytica’s (ca) activities, linking them to ca parent company, scl Group, which specialised in “public relations” campaigns around the world across multiple sectors (from politics to defence and development), with the explicit aim of behavioural change. I then analyse in more detail the claims made by mathematician and machine learning scholar David Sumpter, who dismisses the possibility that ca might have successfully deployed internet psychographics (e.g. online personality profiling) in the winning 2016 Trump presidential campaign in the US. I critique his arguments, pointing at the need to focus on the bigger picture and on the totality of ca methods, rather than analysing psychographics in isolation. This is followed by a section where I use ca whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s 2019 memoir to show the important role that in-depth qualitative research and methods akin ethnographic immersion might have played in building ca big data capabilities. I provide an angle on big data that sees it as complementary, rather than in opposition to, human insight that comes from qualitative immersion in the social realities targeted by ca. The concluding section discusses additional questions that should be explored to gain a deeper understanding of how big data is changing political campaigning, with an emphasis on the important contribution that anthropology can make to these crucial debates.publishedVersionPaid Open Acces

Human-technology relations in an age of surveillance capitalism. Towards an anthropological theory of the dialectic between analogue and digital humanity

What can anthropology contribute to the current debates about the negative effects of social media on people? Starting from a critique of anthropological work that sees human subjectivity and culture as ontologically unaffected by social media use, I propose that human engagement with these digital technologies produces significant ontological transformations that deserve more attention. I develop my analysis in dialogue with Boellstorff’s ontology of the digital, Nardi’s theorisation of virtuality and affordances, and Zuboff’s formulation of surveillance capitalism, and I use empirical illustrations from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal to highlight key theoretical junctures. My main contribution is an outline of an anthropological theory of the dialectic between what I call analogue humanity and digital humanity. The two are mutually constituted but ontologically distinct. In the current political economy of digitalisation, tech companies are driving a process of increasing substitution of analogue humanity and forms of life with digital ones, as part of their quest for accurate prediction and social engineering of all aspects of human behaviour. While an anti-technology stance is neither practicable nor desirable, anthropologists need to think about how analogue humanity can be preserved and nurtured so that it can avoid ontological extinction.publishedVersio

Revisiting Article-S

The frst published account of relative clauses in generative grammar (Smith 1964) analyzed these elements as selected complements of the article or determiner in a nominal. In this paper we revisit the “Article-S” Analysis, examining its underlying assumptions about selection and structure and updating its technical implementation. In so doing we show that Article-S continues to be attractive from a syntactic and semantic point of view. We briefly examine two broader implications of the account for the analysis of languages claimed in the literature to be “D/DP-less” and for the analysis of restrictive modifcation generally. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.31513/linguistica.2017.v13n2a1402

ELARCH Project: Prioritization of threats of cultural heritage for the development of a hazard map. The case study of Aragon’s Castle, Venosa (Italy).

In recent years it has highlighted global interest in disaster prevention and risk mitigation, and the importance of cultural heritage and conservation. According to the literature, the risk is directly linked to two variables: vulnerability and threat, the first related to intrinsic causes of the element and the second to external phenomena. This work is aimed to risk analyses of the Castle of the municipality of Venosa, located in the region of Basilicata (Italy). By studying the threats of the area, based also on historical records of the territory, it has been developed a classification of them, categorized in according to their impact level that could be catastrophic, mild or no harm. Development of threats map by using geographic information systems (GIS) is also discussed