How EU Is Investing Into Deconstructing Smells

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European Union is taking pains to reconstruct a smell and fragrance experience from 16th to 20th century 



Can you imagine a project spending that will preserve the historical smells of the world? The European Union is spending $3.3 million (€2.8M) on the Odeuropa project that aims at bringing back the nostalgia of the smells of various cultures alive.

It is so important to learn from history; and it is a magical feeling to understand and know what some era could smell like and then appreciate how far we have come.


Under the EU Horizon 2020 programme for the project, Odeuropa: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research, the European Union is engaging the Odeuropa to develop novel methods in sensory mining and olfactory heritage science to collect information about smell from multinational digital text and image collections.

The team will also create an online encyclopedia mapping out European smells, along with narratives of their place in the timeline. There will be use of artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the scents from 16th to 20th century. Researchers will feed the computer texts from seven languages and images of paintings to train the machine learning software. “That part of the work will take about 18 months,” shared Odeuropa project manager Marieke van Erp.

By the end of the time, the software will be able to scan thousands of documents and images to identify smell descriptions by itself.

Additionally, the Odeuropa is going to preserve and reconstruct a selection of European smells using heritage science techniques. They will do this by working with museums, artists, and perfumers and will then curate olfactory events and exhibits to educate heritage visitors on engaging with history through the nose.

 The ultimate goal of the Odeuropa project is to show that critically engaging our sense of smell and our scent heritage is an important and a viable means for connecting and promoting Europe’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage.


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