{"id":1794,"date":"2021-08-18T01:00:21","date_gmt":"2021-08-18T01:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/horizon.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2021-08-26T07:44:05","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T07:44:05","slug":"connection-with-the-past-ai-to-find-and-preserve-europes-historical-smells","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/horizon\/1794\/connection-with-the-past-ai-to-find-and-preserve-europes-historical-smells\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Connection with the past\u2019: AI to find and preserve Europe\u2019s historical smells"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s no sense quite like smell to trigger an emotional response. One whiff of a damp basement, a dusty blanket, a ripe strawberry, or a steaming bowl of pasta can instantly evoke feelings and memories that have their roots in the distant past. Yet when it comes to learning about bygone times, we barely give a thought to the vapours that once prevailed \u2013 galleries and museums are the domain of artworks that appeal to our sense of sight, rarely reminding us of how things smelled \u2013 fragrant or foul \u2013 when our forebears walked the earth.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the idea of preserving sensory heritage quietly catches on in the cultural and museum fields, an ambitious project aims to investigate how scents defined communities in the past.\u00a0ODEUROPA is<\/a>\u00a0the first pan-European initiative to use artificial intelligence (AI) to create a library of historic smells. The research team plans to bring some of these aromas from the 17th and 18th century back to life and to preserve them, either by finding words that accurately describe them or by using modern scientific processes to recreate these smells in the lab.<\/p>\n

\u2018One of our aims is to make cultural experiences more tangible,\u2019 explained Inger Leemans, professor of cultural history and project lead of ODEUROPA at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). \u2018Smell is a very direct route to people\u2019s connection with the past. We want to help people find out about the role it played long before they were born, and to safeguard these smells for the future.\u2019<\/p>\n

ODEUROPA is focusing on the period between 1600 and 1920 given the availability of copyright-free images and texts but also because of the major shifts that took place such as industrialisation and the advent of deodorisation. This period is also rich in olfactory data with smell considered an instrument of knowledge, says Prof. Leemans.<\/p>\n

Computers will be trained to forage through digital collections of historic art and literature, and zero-in on references to smells. The researchers\u00a0will then use this AI-generated information to produce a digital open source archive of scents alongside their meaning.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Library<\/strong><\/p>\n

In time, the project\u2019s heritage scientists also plan to create a physical library of aromas, from which bottled scents will be distributed to interested museums. The idea is for smells and artwork to work in tandem to give visitors additional information and an enhanced visceral experience. To make the aromas, the project\u2019s chemists will either amplify tiny samples of surviving scent, such as traces of powdered tobacco extracted from a snuff box, or use the information from the data they collect to create a chemical blend that closely resembles a lost smell.<\/p>\n

\u2018Some scents will be interpretations of smells, historically informed, but made with a degree of imagination,\u2019 explained Cecilia Bembibre, who is working on the project as a heritage scientist from the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage in the UK.<\/p>\n

However, the main objective of the project\u2019s heritage scientists is to treat smells as expressions of heritage, and to document (along with information on a scent’s chemical and sensory characterisation) the value and emotional response a given scent triggered in people living in a given place in Europe at a given time. The idea is for a written interpretation of these smells to be accessible and relevant to future generations in an archive of smells.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018The \u201cbehind the scenes\u201d of the work we do includes an archive to ensure a smell is preserved beyond the \u201cphysical\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

sample,\u2019 said Dr Bembibre.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Today, many of us dwell in urban centres where few of the odours experienced by our ancestors hang in the air to either delight us or turn our stomachs, so there\u2019s little sense that we\u2019re missing out when we stand before a lifelike painting and engage with it solely through our eyes. But if odours are added to an exhibition in a way that dovetails with visual scenes, onlookers will learn so much more, says Prof. Leemans.<\/p>\n

\u2018Smells provide new and highly evocative narratives,\u2019 she said, adding that not every olfactory story is a pleasant one.<\/p>\n

\u2018It might be a church filled with incense, a canal laden with sewage, a 17th century coffee house, or a bleachfield (an open area in the 18th century where cloth was spread out and whitened with human urine, sour milk and lye). If we find a lot of writing where people are complaining about the smell, we\u2019ll trace the sentiment around to see what we can learn about life as it was then.\u2019<\/p>\n

ODEUROPA, which launched earlier this year, involves seven European partners with expertise across a range of disciplines, from history and art history to computational linguistics, the semantic web, computer vision, heritage science and chemistry.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Computers<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018All these teams are facing different challenges,\u2019 said Prof. Leemans. \u2018The first obvious one is, how do you teach a computer to find smell-related references in books and images? Hardly anyone in computer science has developed methodologies for tracing scent information, and certainly not for historical texts and in different languages.\u2019 She says four of their teams are busy in this area, developing annotation schemes where humans train computers to find scent- related information in both texts and images.<\/p>\n

Another team is tasked with cataloguing and classifying the scent references uncovered by AI, finding words to describe historic smells for a contemporary audience. \u2018For each smell, you have to decide \u2018who is the nose?\u2019 (that is, who is doing the smelling) and what was attached to the experience of smelling,\u2019 said Dr Bembibre.<\/p>\n

As it happens, people do a lot of smelling, as well as there being copious smell references, in paintings from the past, which is helpful for the researchers attempting to create a coherent picture of the aromas that wafted through the air in a particular place at a particular time. \u2018You see biblical figures pinching their noses around the grave of Lazarus or the gates of hell; the three magi offering fragrant resins like myrrh and frankincense to the baby Jesus; Mary Magdalene balming Jesus’ feet with spikenard; smoky coffee houses; powdered wigs; perfumed gloves; heaps of dung and chimneys of factories fumigating their odours,\u2019 Prof. Leemans said.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018This all helps us build pictures of fragrant places.\u2019<\/p>\n

Prof. Leemans says maintaining a connection with our heritage is one powerful motive for preserving smells \u2013 another is standing up for the democratisation of museums. Scent-enriched tours will be accessible to blind and visually impaired people in a way entirely visual exhibitions can never be.<\/p>\n

\u2018Scent allows us to walk away from the canonised and weaponised history that comes with statues of men, and instead you have groups of people sharing knowledge and communicating through scent \u2013 for instance, they might discover what cities smell like, or should smell like, and everyone will feel equally included,\u2019 said Prof. Leemans.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018Smell is a very direct route to people\u2019s connection with the past. We want to help people find out about the role it played long before they were born.\u2019\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Inger Leemans, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/i><\/p>\n

Perfume<\/strong><\/p>\n

Prof. Leemans says the project also hopes to develop strategies for heritage communities and professionals to document and safeguard olfactory heritage.<\/p>\n

While the desire to preserve scent may be new to many, the idea is quietly gaining favour in parts of Europe. At the exhibition\u00a0Fleeting \u2013 Scents in Colour<\/i>,<\/a>\u00a0located in the Mauritshuis museum in the Netherlands, visitors are treated to a see-and-smell historic tour of the world. The pandemic has not deterred the museum\u2019s curators; now people can pay to have a fragrance box delivered to their homes, giving them a chance to immerse themselves in the pong and perfume of the 17th century as they tour the exhibition online.<\/p>\n

Another step to safeguard smells that characterise a certain way of life was\u00a0recently taken in France,<\/a>\u00a0when a law was passed to protect the sounds and smells of the countryside. This followed years of complaints that the prevailing sensescapes were offensive. Nearly all the complaints, and the lawsuits that resulted from them, were brought by new arrivals from the city. The new law aims to define and protect the sensory heritage of rural France.<\/p>\n

\u2018People moving to the countryside were protesting about the sound of roosters and the scent of manure, but now this important connection between animals and humans will be protected,\u2019 said Dr Bembibre, adding that maintaining a link between humans and the smell farm-reared animals can play an important role in animal welfare.\u2019<\/p>\n

Prof. Leemans added: \u2018In some countries, there\u2019s a lot of discussion about smaller towns being shielded from the farms that raise the animals they eat, but people have less affective connection (positive emotional bond) with the animals inside when they can\u2019t smell them \u2013 they don\u2019t think about or feel responsible for the treatment of the chickens inside a poultry farm when they\u2019re completely sealed off.<\/p>\n

\u2018There\u2019s a strong argument to hold on to the smell as this is an important way to sensitise people to what is happening in the animal world around them.\u2019<\/p>\n

The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
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