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 results of the project, will be presented at the Smell Culture Fair:

• The Odeuropa Explorer: a searchable database of historical smell references extracted from 50,000 images and over 400,000 historical texts in six languages.
• The Odeuropa Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage: a collection of stories about the smells that shaped our past, as well as those that have value to us today.
• The Odeuropa Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: 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 historic Trippenhuis in Amsterdam. The (fully booked) program 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. Representatives from business and creative industries will present their scent-related technologies and services, and researchers will show the latest advances in smell studies.

ODEUROPA is an international consortium with expertise in history, art history, computer vision, language technology, semantic web, heritage studies and chemistry. These are the partners:
1. KNAW Humanities Cluster (The Netherlands).
2. FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg (Germany).
3. Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy).
4. Eurecom – Sophia Antipolis (France).
5. University of York (United Kingdom)
6. Jožef Stefan Institute, (Slovenia)
7. University College London (United Kingdom)

More information:
Check the project website www.odeuropa.eu and follow the project on X/Twitter: @odeuropa