Sensory studies and the history of smell are fast-expanding research fields, where academics from different disciplines collaborate with perfumers, artists, and heritage experts. These collaborative efforts are exploring new methods for academic research and teaching, which has been ‘ocular centric’ for a long time. How can we make use of different methodologies to ‘find smells’ in material and digital archives? How can we engage embodied knowledge methods to gather and present knowledge? What are the opportunities and challenges these new lines of research and education bring?

This experimental session engages the noses and minds of the audience to:

• introduce participants to the multi-disciplinary field of Olfactory Heritage & History
• familiarize participants with methods to gather smell information from text, image and objects collections
• explore embodied learning methods
• discuss how to make (better) use of the sense of smell in history research and education
• present and explain the "Liberty Bell Smell"
• present the new online module Knowing by Sensing: What is smell history, how can you teach it, and why should you?

The session is built around short pitches, sniff assignments and discussions:

• Inger Leemans (Cultural History) - Introduction to Olfactory Heritage and History
• Mathias Zinnen & Marieke van Erp (Computer Vision / Text Mining / Digital Humanities) - Sensory Mining: How to Capture Information about Past Scents in Digital Text and Image Collections?
• Cecilia Bembibre - (Heritage Science) Recreations or reconstructions? How to Represent Heritage Scents?
• William Tullett - (Olfactory history) Liberty Stinks! The Politics of Smelling the Past
• Kate McLean - (Design Studies) Smell Mapping. How to Visualize Olfactory Narratives?
• Sofia Ehrich - (Museology) Embodied learning in Museums

• Discussion: Towards an Encyclopaedia of Smell Heritage

→ The session connects to the Smell walk organized by Kate McLean [for more information see conference program]

Key words

Sensory Studies - History of Smell - Olfactory Heritage - Sensory mining - Embodied learning - Multisensory museology