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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


INNOVATION


A NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA EXPLORES EUROPE’S SMELLY HISTORY

Odeuropa is an online database of scents from 16th- to early 20th-century Europe
culled from historical literature and art

Laura Kiniry

Travel Correspondent

December 12, 2023

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Example predictions of smell-related objects from the object detection models
developed by the Odeuropa project computer vision team. Image credits: J.P.
Filedt Kok, 2007, 'Floris Claesz. van Dijck, Still Life with Cheeses, c. 1615',
in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the
Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam:
hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8296 (accessed 23 October 2023 11:21:47).
 


Scent can transport us. One whiff of, say, pine needles, might bring you right
back to a snowshoeing adventure in the forests of Washington’s Cascade
Mountains, or to a treasured Christmas morning. Smell is a powerful tool for
experiencing the world around us, and as such, more so than any sense, it is
inextricably linked to our memories.

So when the European Union put out a call to researchers to help museums enhance
the impact of their digital collections, “We immediately thought: smell,” says
Inger Leemans, a professor of cultural history at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
and the principal investigator for Odeuropa, an E.U.-funded research project
aimed at showcasing the significance of olfactory heritage in European culture.

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At its core, Odeuropa is an encyclopedia of smells. The online database pulls
together the vast scent-related image and textual data of museums, universities
and other heritage institutions, “to help people discover the olfactory cultures
and vocabularies of the past,” says Leemans. This includes everything from
disease-fighting perfumes to the stench of industrialization in historic
literature and paintings.

Odeuropa used artificial intelligence identify smell-related aspects of images.
Odeuropa

When the project was first publicly announced in November 2020, the team
described its plans to use artificial intelligence to identify and analyze
references to smells from 16th- to early 20th-century Europe in historical texts
and images. The aim, Leemans told the Independent at the time, was to “dive into
digital heritage collections to discover key scents of Europe and bring them
back to the nose.” Now, three years on, Odeuropa has officially launched its
products—a Smell Explorer search engine, which offers insight into how the past
smelled, as well as how people described, depicted and experienced those smells,
and the Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, with entries ranging from
car interiors to coffeehouses. Odeuropa also hosted a one-day Smell Culture Fair
in Amsterdam on November 28 to share the overall project’s final results.

Odeuropa’s team is made up of olfactory experts—some, according to Leemans,
who’d already been developing A.I. technologies around heritage and food
culture, others who were collaborating with museums and libraries to capture the
smell of historical objects, and a few who’d been testing the waters of
“olfactory storytelling,” bringing smells into museums through guided tours.
Together, they’ve used A.I. technology to capture what Leemans calls “smell
events,” or things like specific occasions, circumstances and places “described
by historical nose witnesses.”

Inger Leemans, project lead of Odeuropa and interim director at the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Cluster, smells spices in
the historic apothecary Jacob Hooy in Amsterdam, which has been trading since
1743. Odeuropa

“This sort of leg work is really important for assisting other scholars,
especially early career scholars or students, in searching for this sort of
ephemeral evidence of the past,” says Evan Kutzler, a U.S. historian and the
author of Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity
in Civil War Prisons. “It’s something that’s always there but can sometimes be
hard to identify.”



Rather than tracing a smell from a chemical perspective, as a perfumer does when
they describe a scent through top notes and base notes (e.g. the fragrance of
rose, followed by a more long-lasting vanilla), Odeuropa maps smell as a
“cultural phenomenon.” For example, gathering images and texts that relate to
the smell of Futurism, an art movement originating from early 20th-century Italy
that emphasized energy and movement, or mining the internet for content
capturing the aromas of, say, France or the plague.

“We had many long conversations with our humanities and social science
scholars,” says Leemans, “as well as with our chemical and perfume partners to
make a model for smell moments that incorporate places, sentiments, attributes,
etc.” Odeuropa then developed a web browser that could pull such details from
approximately 23,000 images and 62,000 historic texts in seven different
languages (including English, French and German), all which were available in
the public domain. “When the project’s initial results came in,” says Leemans,
“we were expecting gibberish or all kinds of non-smell-related quotes.” Instead,
what they captured was over 2.5 million nose-witness accounts, such as one
associating “odorous airs” with feelings of nostalgia and gratitude, and another
alluding to the “insufferable” scent of a mid-19th-century Edinburgh apartment.

“Working on smell opens up whole new ways of thinking about the experience of
time in the past and present,” says William Tullett, an Odeuropa team member and
author of Smell in 18th-Century England. For instance, he says, the way we
perceive the smell of garlic today might be entirely different from the ways
people thought about it 200 years ago. “Different medical and cultural ideas led
to odors having different meanings,” he says, “but we can learn a lot about the
relationship between past and present by comparing those reactions.”

The Smell Explorer search engine offers insight into how the past smelled, as
well as how people described, depicted and experienced those smells. Odeuropa

Odeuropa’s Smell Explorer and Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage are
both publicly accessible, available to everyone from an aromatherapist who wants
to learn ancient recipes to an armchair traveler who’s interested in the
sometimes off-putting scent of canals in 19th-century Europe. To create the
Smell Explorer tool, Odeuropa’s team manually annotated 5,000 images picturing
objects associated with smells—like perfume bottles or a person holding their
nose—and then essentially trained their search engine to recognize similar
smell-related elements in other photos, expanding their overall database in the
process. They then did the same with thousands of historical books, including
travelogues, botanical textbooks and even sanitary reports, creating an
automated system that could replicate the manual annotations by identifying
things like smell-related emotions and characteristics (e.g. a “fragrant”
bedroom or “putrid” algae) attributed to a particular place, object or event. Of
the 550 or so smell sources, 115 fragrant spaces and 35 olfactory gestures (such
as “diaper changing” and “bleaching”) showcased, some like “abstract,” “being”
and “place” are a little less concrete than say, “forest fire” or “fish market.”
“My guess,” says Kutzler, “is that when you’re just beginning to index a project
like this, it makes sense to take as wide of an approach as possible.”

The Smell Explorer calls up occurrences of "air pollution" in historical texts.
Odeuropa

The Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage explores the stories behind
approximately 120 scents. It’s arranged in two types of resources: Entries,
which are Wikipedia-like descriptions written by experts in fields such as
chemistry and the social sciences and structured under five key categories
(Smells, Places, Practices, Feelings and Noses), each with its own data to
explore, and Storylines, clickable stories of smell history that include a
series of interlocking themes, taking readers on a deep delve into the
smellscapes of the past. For example, click on the word “city” and you’re
suddenly transported to Amsterdam’s Rozemarijnsteeg (Rosemary Street), where
women once crafted wreaths of rosemary for upcoming funerals. A couple more
clicks, and you’re reading about how clove-studded oranges once helped ward off
the plague, and learning that Amsterdam’s oldest apothecary, Jacob Hooy, not
only was filled with wonders and supposedly disease-fighting scents, but also is
still open and operating today. “I especially enjoy these ‘Storylines’ portals
into thinking like a sensory historian,” says Kutzler. “Together with the
encyclopedia’s ‘Entries,’ they have the potential to open up access to sensory
history and make it easier to really explore the kinds of sources that are out
there.”

The Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage explores the stories behind
approximately 120 scents. Odeuropa


Odeuropa’s work comes at an ideal time, since over the last decade a growing
number of museums, archives and other cultural institutions have begun
incorporating olfactory storytelling into their exhibits. In autumn 2022,
Philadelphia’s Penn Museum presented the first major U.S. exhibition by
Berlin-based smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas, a series of 20
“immersive installations” that utilized smells such as excreted sweat and
vanilla—the world’s favorite scent—as talking points for issues like
anthropology and climate change. Then, this past March, the Smithsonian’s own
Hirshhorn Museum led a special olfactory tour of the exhibition “Put It This
Way: (Re)Visions of the Hirshhorn Collection.” For the event, artists and
perfumistas (i.e., people who take fragrances quite seriously) Cianne Fragione
and Renee Stout each paired a perfume from their own collections with six of the
exhibition artworks. For example, Fragione picked Maison Margiela Replica Jazz
Club, with its notes of pink pepper, rum and tobacco leaf, to accompany visual
experimental artist Carolee Schneemann’s black-and-white photographic series
Eye/Body 1963. “People want to connect with the works in ways that go beyond
just the visual,” says Nancy Hirshbein, a Hirshhorn gallery guide who was in
charge of the olfactory tour. “It’s fun for us to experience art in unexpected
ways,” she says, and gain a deeper understanding of each piece in the process.

The encyclopedia includes entries ranging from car interiors to coffeehouses. 
Odeuropa

Along with presenting Odeuropa’s findings, the recent Smell Culture Fair offered
hands-on training in topics like olfactory storytelling and working with scents
in galleries, libraries, archives and museums. The project also consisted of a
downloadable Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit, a how-to guide for incorporating
smells into museums and other heritage institutions. “It’s great to see sensory
historians working with museums and thinking about how we can create such
experiences appropriately, ethnically and historically,” says Kutzler.

In turn, says Leemans, these organizations can “help us educate people in the
here and now about the important role scents play in our lives.”



Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.



Laura Kiniry | READ MORE

Laura Kiniry is a San Francisco-based freelance writer specializing in food,
drink, and travel. She contributes to a variety of outlets including American
Way, O-The Oprah Magazine, BBC.com, and numerous AAA pubs.


Filed Under: Art, Artificial Intelligence, European History, Exhibitions,
Literature, Museums, Senses
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