17-11-2023

Odeuropa presents research results

On November 28, 2023, researchers from the international project Odeuropa will highlight the value of contacting cultural heritage through the sense of smell at the Smell Culture Fair in Amsterdam. Promoting a ‘nose-on’ approach to history and heritage, the event will offer museums, creative industries and academics tools and techniques to use smells to engage their audiences.

Odeuropa, funded by the European Horizon 2020 program, has been documenting the smells of Europe as part of cultural heritage since 2021. The project uses artificial intelligence (AI) to investigate the importance of scents and smelling, and to discover how scents have moulded our communities and traditions. The project will come to a close in December 2023.

Three online resources, the main outputs of the project, will be presented at the Smell Culture Fair:

The Odeuropa Smell Explorer – a searchable database of historic smell references extracted from 50,000 images and over 400,000 historic texts in six languages
The Odeuropa Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage – a collection of stories about the smells that have shaped our past, as well as those that have value to us today
The Odeuropa Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: A ‘How-To’ Guide for Working with Smells in GLAMs and Heritage Institutions – a hands-on online guide for museums who wish to learn how to use smell to engage audiences.

The Smell Culture Fair will take place at the historical Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. The programme includes hands-on training sessions on exploring olfactory data and telling stories using scent, as well as practical training on measuring the impact of olfactory events in galleries, archives, libraries and museums.

ODEUROPA is an international consortium with expertise in history, art history, computer vision, computational linguistics, semantic web, heritage science and chemistry. These are the partners: