Project aims to collect scents that will take you to old Europe

Thanks to innovative technology, researchers have gathered libraries of ancient tomes, museums of bygone artifacts, classical music treatises, and, in modern times, records of old photos and films that offer windows into the past.

But can we have a library of old smells?

That’s the question scientists, historians and experts in artificial intelligence across the U. K. and Europe will attempt to answer, as part a $ 4.9- million project to identify and catalogue the different aromas smelled by Europeans between the 16th and early 20th centuries.

The project, named “Odeuropa,” will begin in January, and will see researchers develop artificial intelligence to scour through historical texts in seven languages, looking for descriptions of odours and the context that comes with them.

“Once you start looking at printed texts published in Europe since 1500 you will find loads of references to smell, from religious scents, like the smell of incense, through to things like tobacco,” Dr. William Tullett of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, a member of the Odeuropa team and the author of Smell in Eighteenth- Century England, told the Guardian.

Over the next three years, the collected information will be used to develop a digital encyclopedia of European smells, replete with insights into the emotions and places connected to certain scents.

“It will ( also) include discussions of particular types of noses from the past — the kinds of people for whom smell was significant and what smell meant to them,” Tullett added. “That could take us into all kinds of different scents, whether that is the use of herbs like rosemary to protect against plague, (or) the use of smelling salts in the 18th and 19th centuries as an antidote to fits and fainting.”

smell can have a real impact on the way people engage.

New methods in sensory mining and olfactory heritage will also be used to scour text and image collections for information on smells. The resulting encyclopedia, to be named the Encyclopedia of Smell Heritage, will “become an archive for the olfactory heritage of Europe, enabling future generations to access and learn about the scented past,” a news release reads.

An important part of the project, Tullett told the Guardian, will be to show how the meanings and uses of different smells have changed over time. Take, for instance, tobacco.

“It is a commodity that is introduced into Europe in the 16th century that starts off as being a very exotic kind of smell, but then quickly becomes domesticated and becomes part of the normal smell- scape of lots of European towns,” said Tullett.

“Once we are getting into the 18th century, people are complaining actively about the use of tobacco in theatres,” he said.

Today, as a result of smoking bans, the smell of tobacco is gradually disappearing from our olfactory repertoire, he added.

The team will also collaborate with chemists and perfumers to recreate the old-timey smells, and will research how odours, and their significance, can enhance the experience of guests visiting museums and other heritage sites.

The Jorvik Viking Centre in York, U. K., recreated the stench of the 10th century, and visitors said it boosted their experience.

“One of the things that the Jorvik Viking Centre demonstrates is that smell can have a real impact on the way people engage with museums,” said Tullett.