Odeuropa Autumn Newsletter 2022
Dear friends,
It's been a busy quarter for the Odeuropa team: in the last few months, we have explored and documented many smell stories in European history and heritage, and we have been working on online environments to make the data accessible. We have also held a conference on the scents of the past, toured Amsterdam following our noses, led a hackathon on sensory mining and published the first peer-reviewed scent!
Here are some highlights that might interest you:
PastScent Conference in Amsterdam
Call for Contributions for the Encyclopaedia of Smell History and Heritage
City Sniffers tours and app
Hackathon at Ljubljana National Library
Publication of the first peer-reviewed scent
Scents in GLAMs: a database
Communicating our work
Keep reading for more details!
PastScent Conference in Amsterdam
At the end of the summer, we hosted some of the most innovative, inspiring and knowledgeable researchers in smell studies and a few smell experts with industry expertise in Amsterdam. Over two days, we made use of the data gathered and processed via the Odeuropa computer science pipeline to construct stories about smell’s past that connects digitized text and images to both stories, scents, and GLAM collections. Some of these stories can already be browsed via the Odeuropa Smell Explorer.
As we develop one of the major outputs of the project – an online Encyclopaedia of Smell History and Heritage – we are offering an opportunity for researchers and smell experts to get involved in writing entries. If you are interested in writing an entry of 2,000-5,000 words on a smell, place, or nose in European history from the 1600s to the 1920s then you can read more about our call for contributions here or get in touch with william.tullett@aru.ac.uk.
City Sniffers tours and app
For a few weeks in September and October, urban ramblers were able to discover a new side to Amsterdam, thanks to City Sniffers: A smell tour of Amsterdam’s ecohistory. The tour started at Amsterdam Museum and followed a path within the city. Using a phone application developed by Odeuropa researchers to navigate, participants walked around smelling and exploring stories connected to the present history of Amsterdam. The tour also included the smells of the city’s past via a Rub’n’Sniff map (pictured) containing five emblematic aromas. While the physical tours are now finished, you can still take part in the virtual walk using the free phone app.
Hackathon at Ljubljana National Library
Earlier this month, a number of cultural heritage professionals, digital heritage collection specialists, computer science scholars, historians and computational linguists joined us in Ljubljana for the 'Improve your olfactory language' Odeuropa Hackathon. Over two intensive days, and in the beautiful environment of the National Library, we tried out cutting edge research and development in sensory data-mining, and discussed the opportunities of olfactory approaches to cultural collections and archives. Later, we set out on a smellwalk of the library, led by our colleague Victoria-Anne Michel.
Publication of the first peer-reviewed scent
Continuing the collaboration between Odeuropa and the American History Review (AHR) journal, we are proud to announce the publication of the first peer-reviewed scent, led by Dr William Tullett in collaboration with Odeuropa colleagues. The newly published articles Whiffstory: Using Multidisciplinary Methods to Represent the Olfactory Past and Making Whiffstory: A Contemporary Re-creation of an Early Modern Scent for Perfumed Gloves contain a scratch-n-sniff card with the perfume of historic gloves, inspired by those seen on the portrait of Ulm patrician Helena Schermar. This smell, developed in collaboration with IFF, was reviewed by academics and perfumers, pioneering a new methodological approach to sensory publishing.
Scents in GLAMs: a database
Do you know of an exhibition, mediation activity or artistic happening that used smells? You can tell us about it by filling this form.
We are collecting data to identify and map the diverse uses of smells in GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) and heritage sites, both past and present. This will inform our research in the Odeuropa project, with an open database as an outcome. This will be helpful to museum visitors, olfactory artists and perfumers and GLAMs professionals to find information and inspiration in their work with smells in heritage.
If you want to contribute, you can click on the form linked above and add an example where smell was used in a GLAM. If you would like to provide more than one example, you will want to complete an individual form each time. We really appreciate your collaboration.
Communicating our work
Presenting and discussing our work, as well as learning about what other people are doing, is one of the ways we have to maintain a conversation with researchers, heritage organisations, industry and the general public. We learn a lot from these interactions and often find ways to expand our network. Recently, we were invited to speak at the annual meeting of the GDR-03 research group (part of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, CNRS); Prof. Inger Leemans took part in the Europeana Research Community café, Prof. Raphael Troncy shared a video overview of the work of partner EURECOM in Odeuropa and Dr Cecilia Bembibre discussed olfactory science in an IPERION HS webinar. We've been reaching new readers through the media, with Horizon Europe magazine reporting on the project via an engaging video. And we continuously expand our understanding of the links between smell and heritage through fascintaing insights such as those of Josephine Koopman, who supported the project through an internship, and has written about her thesis work on (post)colonial smellscapes.
Thanks for sharing this space. We wish you a warm winter and a wonderful holiday season. We'll be back in the new year; in the meantime, follow us on twitter and visit the Odeuropa website for more news.
Fragrant wishes,
The Odeuropa team