"Connection with the past": using AI to help find and preserve Europe's historical smells

Scent-enriched tours will be accessible to visually impaired people in a way entirely visual exhibitions can never be. 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. ODEUROPA is the 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. "One of our aims is to make cultural experiences more tangible," explained Inger Leemans, professor of cultural history and project lead of ODEUROPA at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).