Odeuropa Summer Newsletter 2021
Dear friends,
We hope you have enjoyed the summer so far and are immersing yourself in sensory discovery, wherever you are.
The Odeuropa team recently visited the Maurithuis exhibition Fleeting Scents in Colour, where you can experience olfactory interpretations of 17th century Dutch art.
While the presential exhibition has just closed, online tours are still available - you can still sniff the artworks via a postal smell kit, as below:
Our Smellinars - a series of online talks reflecting on history, heritage and smell, open to all - return later this month. Read an account of the inaugural lecture by Professor David Howes in anticipation of an exciting autumn programme.
If you are curious about the research at the heart of Odeuropa, this month provides several opportunities to engage with our team of researchers, who will be sharing the progress and discussing findings with expert and general audiences at various events:
This Friday 3 September, Dr Sara Tonelli, from Fondazione Bruno Kessler, will give a keynote talk at the Language, Data and Knowledge 2021 conference A Smell is Worth a Thousand Words: Olfactory Information Extraction and Semantic Processing in a Multilingual Perspective. In Odeuropa, Sara leads the extraction of olfactory information from historic texts.
On Tuesday 7 September, Dr Marieke van Erp will give The Semantics of Smell keynote talk at the Semantics 2021 conference in Amsterdam, discussing how the Odeuropa project aims to rediscover our olfactory heritage through an interdisciplinary approach that includes a team of language technology, computer vision, and semantic web experts, historians, and museologists.
On Tuesday 14 September, Prof. Inger Leemans and Dr Cecilia Bembibre, Dr Caro Verbeek and Dr Raphaël Troncy will be part of the 25th edition of SITEM, the international show for museums, to discuss the power of scent to evoke and connect with our cultural heritage. You can follow the Odeuropa session of the conference online. It's going to be a busy month!
Finally, one more space to catch up with us: Odeuropa was featured in the latest issue of Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
We are saddened to announce that our highly esteemed colleague and member of the Odeuropa Advisory Board Albert van der Zeijden passed away recently. Albert generously shared his expertise and experience in the field of intangible cultural heritage. Please join us in remembering him.
Thanks for sharing this space, and until the autumn, when we'll start our collaboration with museums and bring olfactory events to European audiences. In the meantime, follow us on twitter and visit the Odeuropa website for more news.
Fragrant greetings,
The Odeuropa team