Odeuropa will apply state-of-the-art AI techniques to cultural heritage text and image datasets spanning four centuries of European history, to identify and trace how ‘smell’ was expressed in different languages, with what places it was associated, what kinds of events and practices it characterised, and to what emotions it was linked. This multi-modal information will be curated, following semantic web standards, stored in the ‘European Olfactory Knowledge Graph’ (EOKG), and then drawn on to create new ‘storylines’ informed by cultural history research. The storyline resources will be prepared in different formats for different audiences: as an online ‘Encyclopaedia of European Smell Heritage’, as ‘interactive notebook’ demonstrators, and in the form of toolkits and training documentation describing best-practices in olfactory museology. We will develop new, evidence-based methodologies to quantify the impact of multisensory visitor engagement, and use this data to support the implementation of policy recommendations for the recognition, promotion, presentation and safe-guarding of our olfactory heritage.

DHLab involvement: Marieke van Erp is involved as project manager and co-developer of smell reference language and semantic web technology.