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Odeuropa with William Tullett
139 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Sarah Kernan talks to William Tullett, Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and a Lead in the Horizon 2020 funded project Odeuropa. This European research project was designed to show that the sense of smell and scent, or olfactory, heritage is an important way to connect, promote, and protect Europe’s cultural heritage. This episode was recorded just before the project’s funding period concluded at the end of 2023. Follow William Tullett and Odeuropa on X (formerly Twitter) for updates.
Show notes, links, and transcript available on The Recipes Project.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Around the Table' with Sarah Kernan
00:00:08
Speaker
This is Around the Table, a new podcast from the Recipes Project.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm your host, Sarah Kernan.
00:00:16
Speaker
Together, we will learn about exciting scholars, professionals, projects, resources, and collections focused on historical recipes.
What is the Horizon 2020 project, Odaropa?
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Speaker
Today I'm speaking to Dr. William Tullett, lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York and a lead in the Horizon 2020 funded project Odaropa.
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Speaker
This European research project was designed to show that the sense of smell and scent or olfactory heritage is an important way to connect, promote, and protect Europe's cultural heritage.
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Will, thank you so much for joining me today.
Odaropa's Multidisciplinary Approach
00:00:54
Speaker
Thanks for inviting me.
00:00:54
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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Well, could you tell us a bit about Odaropa?
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What's the purpose of the project?
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Who is participating?
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Just some general information about it.
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Yeah, so it's a project that...
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Well, it's still running, although it started in 2021 in the midst of COVID and will finish at the end of this year.
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Because of that, it feels like it's been running for a much longer time than it has, I think.
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But the main idea of the project is to use a kind of multidisciplinary mix of methods that includes not just history and art history and literary studies, but also computer science, so natural language processing and computer vision to work with both digitised text and images from the past.
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And also heritage science.
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So kind of working with museums and what we would call GLAMs, so galleries, libraries, archives, museums, but also with chemistry, analytical chemistry that allows us to examine the smells that
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objects from the past exude and to try and preserve them for the future.
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So it's an interdisciplinary project.
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It involves people across six countries, seven different languages, multiple different universities.
The Importance of Smell in History and Museums
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So it's been quite a feat of organization.
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And I'm luckily not the chief PI.
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So the PI is Inge Lehmans in Amsterdam, who with her other Amsterdam colleagues, including Marika van Erp, have been the ones kind of really organizing and making sure that we all do what we're told.
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So it's been quite a big project and an exciting project to be part of.
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And we're now getting to the stage where we're finally releasing a lot of the kind of results that
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and final outputs of the project for people to kind of look at and play with.
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So there are tools, there are books, there are various websites and bits of digitized data for people to look at.
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So we're now at the point where encouraging people to engage with all of that really.
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Well, before we get into all of those products that are coming out of Odaropa, could you speak a little bit about how the project was initially developed and how the team came together?
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Because as you mentioned, it is a very large project.
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It's a very impressive group of researchers who have come together.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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I mean, I think, so the project came together really from the Amsterdam side, from Inge Lehmans and Marie Kavaner and Arno Boss, who are in the Dutch side of the project.
00:03:29
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And I think one of the things that they did that was really good was...
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and that you don't see all the time now, now we've got Zoom for everything, is that they invited all of the people that they wanted to be involved in the project to Amsterdam, right?
00:03:40
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So we had multiple workshops together where we kind of talked about the kind of things that we'd like to do, the kind of outputs that we wanted to see from the project.
00:03:47
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And I think one of the big challenges with these big interdisciplinary projects of the sort that European Horizon 2020 funds is that you want projects that...
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give outputs that are state of the art, not just for the historians on the projects, but also for the people who are doing the computer science side of it, the heritage science side of it.
00:04:09
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So trying to make sure that all of the people involved are doing work that they find kind of useful and cutting edge and is going to advance knowledge in their own disciplines.
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And I think smell was a useful tool
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thing to focus those various disciplines around, partly because it's a sense and a stimuli that really presents a whole series of problems.
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So linguistically, smell is a problem, right?
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It's difficult to describe smells.
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How do we find them?
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How do we categorize them?
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What does it mean to visualize smell in an image?
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And how do we identify them in images?
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Can we archive smells?
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How do we archive and preserve them?
00:04:52
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So kind of all of these questions that I think resonated with all the different disciplines that were involved in the project made smell a kind of, to use the slang of grants people, a kind of wicked problem
Technological Methods in Odaropa
00:05:06
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for us to kind of work with.
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And really the project's
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The call that we applied for, because obviously, you know, you can't just come up with good ideas.
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There has to be a call out there that fits it.
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The call that we aimed at was one that was about reconnecting digital resources with museums.
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And so essentially what we're trying to do is use smell as a way to connect all of these digitized texts, databases and image databases and archival catalogs and so on,
00:05:38
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with the kind of experience of heritage in heritage sites and museums and spaces by bringing smells back into those spaces and so that's really what the kind of project has has been all about and sort of geared towards as you alluded to smell is a difficult topic to work with in many ways and um
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It's quite ephemeral in so many ways and contexts.
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It's different to so many people.
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Why should we be interested in studying and preserving and contextualizing smells and olfactory heritage and experiences, especially ones in the past?
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Why does that matter?
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And how does Otaropa fit into that?
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So I think the reason that historicizing smell, preserving smell,
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contextualizing smells both in the past and present matters is because smells are kind of fundamental part of our everyday experience.
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It's a fundamental part of how not just humans engage with the world, but also other animals, more than human animals as well.
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And if one of the goals of...
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academic research in general is to understand the ways that we and other creatures experience the world, then smell should therefore kind of be a fundamental part of that.
00:06:54
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But I think also there's been a tendency ever since really the 19th century in museums, and it's a tendency that luckily is now slowly being undone,
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to make museums and the experience of heritage all about the visual, or at least the audio visual.
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And so if smell is really central and fundamental to our everyday experience, and indeed was central and fundamental to people's everyday experience in the past,
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then it makes sense to try and reintegrate that into museum spaces, particularly actually in cases where the artifacts themselves or the paintings or other objects in museums and heritage sites have had particularly important olfactory or smell-related connections.
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It's the classic case of, well, we can have an incense burner in a glass case, but
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The whole point was that this thing was supposed to be used to burn incense and that had a smell and indeed had other kind of visual tactile qualities to it.
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So I think it's necessary for us to kind of recontextualize all of the things in museums that we have.
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But I think there's kind of a much bigger, broader reason why engaging with smell is really important.
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And that's that many people today are often alienated from their sense of smell.
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And yet, if we are to respond to the massive challenges that face the globe in the next five, ten years, we need to...
00:08:30
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engage more with our environment and understand our environment better.
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And one way to do that is through smell.
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So by engaging people's noses, by engaging not just academics and students with smell, but museums and libraries and the people that work in them and the audiences that use them,
00:08:52
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By engaging those constituencies with their nose, what we're trying to do is also create a sense of olfactory awareness and encourage people to attend to the evidence of their noses more.
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And a simple example of why that's important is we're all familiar with the idea of
00:09:10
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sell by dates and use by dates on packaging for food.
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Now, if you're in the 17th century and you went to buy food, you would go to a market and you would pick stuff up and feel it and touch it and, you know, put your knife into butter and take out the center of it so you could smell it.
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You know, all of this kind of very multi-sensory interaction.
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And now in the 20th and 21st century, smell in supermarkets and other spaces that sell food, you know, smells are still important, but they're fundamentally about trying to get people to spend their money.
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They're about creating a desire for products rather than allowing people to say quality of products.
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And so...
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When there's now been a move to try and get people away from using sell-by dates and use-by dates and instead just to kind of trust their own senses in order to be more sustainable by using food if it's still fresh, actually it's been really interesting to see that many people are not able necessarily to smell out whether milk is fresh or not, right?
00:10:13
Speaker
Or whether it's gone off or not because they're just not used to using their noses.
Sensory Studies as an Interdisciplinary Field
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So that's a kind of simple example, I think, of why encouraging people to be attentive to the evidence of their nose and getting people to engage with their nose is quite important from the point of view of sustainability and environmental awareness.
00:10:31
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And engaging our students, engaging museums and their audiences with smell is one way to create that more sustained olfactory awareness among people.
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So there's a kind of wider social gap.
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role, I think, that smell can play.
00:10:45
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And history is one way to get that to people.
00:10:48
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That's a really wonderful connection from the historical to how we can use that today in present day context.
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How does Otaropa actually collect information, research that information about smells?
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What is the process of what Otaropa is doing?
00:11:08
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So one of the things that Odorope is trying to do is to get smell out of lots and lots and lots of digitized archives.
00:11:17
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So for anybody who's listening to this podcast who is a historian or has worked with historical texts online, you'll be aware that there are loads and loads of great databases now full of historical source material.
00:11:30
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For example, early English books online or
00:11:33
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particularly relevant for this podcast, the Welcome Library's amazing collection of digitized recipe books.
00:11:40
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But what we wanted to be able to do is kind of cut down the kind of needle in the haystack work of finding smell in those documents and to extract as many examples of smell occurring in digitized texts, historical texts as possible.
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And so we composed a massive data set of historical texts that includes
00:12:02
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text in English, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Slovenian, and some Latin.
00:12:10
Speaker
And then we trained models to be able to detect references to smell in those texts.
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And so we have
Smell Explorer and Innovative Methodologies
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kind of seed words like smell or stink or, you know, kind of key olfactory terms.
00:12:25
Speaker
But then we also are looking for the different
00:12:27
Speaker
what the natural language processing people would call frame elements.
00:12:30
Speaker
So who's doing the smelling?
00:12:32
Speaker
Where is the smelling occurring?
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How are they describing what they're smelling?
00:12:35
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All of that kind of data as well.
00:12:37
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What are the emotions that are connected to the example?
00:12:40
Speaker
And so, yeah, we trained models by annotating texts ourselves and then using those to train the models.
00:12:50
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And...
00:12:51
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Let them loose on this historical text data.
00:12:54
Speaker
And then it's gathered loads and loads and loads of references to smell.
00:12:56
Speaker
I mean, you know, I think we're now at the stage in the Smell Explorer, which is our kind of online database, which anybody can go and look at of smell exits.
00:13:06
Speaker
I think we're now at the stage where there's millions of references to smells from text data in there, including text from Gallica, the big online French digitized collections, the Deutsche Historic Archive, like loads of different text.
00:13:23
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So that's the text part.
00:13:24
Speaker
Then there's the images part, which is much more difficult because how do you decide what's smelly in an image?
00:13:29
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Right, exactly.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's a problem, right?
00:13:32
Speaker
And it's a problem that kind of...
00:13:35
Speaker
I think you could easily annoy a lot of art historians by answering badly.
00:13:40
Speaker
And so one of the things that we did early on in the project was to think about, well, what are the types of objects or animals or gestures or spaces which...
00:13:53
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in different periods from the 1600s to the 1920s were thought to evoke smell right so there are really obvious things like gestures around like holding the nose or taking snuff or smoking tobacco for example um or throwing up uh which is something that occurs in lots of allegories of smell particularly dutch ones in the 17th century
00:14:16
Speaker
But also we're looking at animals, so like dogs, civic cats, you know, that were particularly associated with smell.
00:14:23
Speaker
And then also flowers as well.
00:14:24
Speaker
So we did a whole kind of side project where we were training models to look and identify different flowers in still lives, right?
00:14:33
Speaker
That's been...
00:14:35
Speaker
interesting and tricky part of the project but essentially it involves drawing boxes around objects and then training computers to then find more of those objects um that's the very short form explanation so for example we trained it to find gloves because early modern gloves were almost always perfumed so if we can find lots and lots of examples of gloves we can kind of
00:14:54
Speaker
That's one olfactory object that we can find.
00:14:56
Speaker
Or we looked at chimneys, and then we looked at chimneys with smoke and without smoke to think about the representation of smell and pollution, or different smoke coming from different objects.
00:15:07
Speaker
So if it's coming from a chimney, it's smoke.
00:15:09
Speaker
If it's kind of a cloud of smoke that we've identified that's coming from a teapot, then it's more of a kind of steam, right?
00:15:16
Speaker
So thinking about different forms of vapour and how you identify them in images.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:20
Speaker
So that's the text and image stuff.
00:15:22
Speaker
And then the other part of it, I guess, is the heritage side of it, which has involved some quite different methods.
00:15:30
Speaker
And for the heritage science side of it, we've kind of had a mix of social science methods.
00:15:35
Speaker
So for example, one of our case studies was the smell of heritage vehicles, particularly cars.
00:15:45
Speaker
And we ended up interviewing lots of car enthusiasts about like kind of do they value the smells of their cars and how would they describe them?
00:15:53
Speaker
We also, but then we also used scientific methods.
00:15:56
Speaker
So we used various forms of pump and other, that would basically pump air over a fiber and the fiber would extract the volatile organic compounds.
00:16:07
Speaker
So then once you've captured the volatile organic compounds, you take them to a lab, you put them in a gas chromatography mass spectrometry machine,
00:16:14
Speaker
which then allows you to essentially see which compounds are making up the smell of that particular car.
00:16:23
Speaker
So it was a mix of social science stuff and more what people wrongly or rightly might call hard sciences like chemistry.
00:16:31
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So it's a truly interdisciplinary project.
00:16:33
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And it's partly thinking about...
00:16:37
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I think the way in which smells and the impressions that they leave are not just textual, but also actually materially about us today, which I think the kind of car example really nicely gives you a sense of.
00:16:55
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Absolutely.
00:16:57
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So yeah, a whole different mix of methods to extract smells.
00:17:00
Speaker
And hopefully we'll keep to use, keep using that, that multidisciplinary mix into the future, because I think that's kind of the future of smell studies and sensory studies.
00:17:09
Speaker
That's really fascinating how many, how many different sides there are to this project and how many different disciplines are converging in one place.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's always been a strength
Public Interest and Historical Narratives of Smell
00:17:21
Speaker
of sensory studies, right?
00:17:22
Speaker
So like sensory studies, you know, is a field that really comes from anthropology and geography, but now has this kind of rich interdisciplinary mix of methods.
00:17:31
Speaker
And if you go to the Uncommon Senses Conference, which is the big kind of interdisciplinary sensory studies conference in Concordia in Montreal every two years, you'll kind of see a whole rich array of people doing
00:17:44
Speaker
whole different series of methodologies from kind of more common historical literary art historical types of thing to people who are doing like research on senses and spider sex and you know we had a whole panel where it was people getting to play with different types of tactile technologies like rumble chairs and tools for training dentists that involved scraping off virtual plaque and all this kind of stuff so
00:18:11
Speaker
I think there's kind of a sense in which we are just drawing on a tradition within sensory studies that is very multidisciplinary in really interesting ways.
00:18:21
Speaker
Now that Otaropa is coming to a close, could you talk a bit about some of its outputs, the products that have come of Otaropa and whether or not those have achieved Otaropa's main goals?
00:18:38
Speaker
Well, of course we've achieved all of our main goals on Europa.
00:18:42
Speaker
I'm not going to suggest otherwise.
00:18:43
Speaker
I mean, I think in some ways that we've achieved and exceeded in many respects what we set out to do.
00:18:50
Speaker
And that's partly because as soon as we started to talk about smell and the past, when we announced the project in late November 2018,
00:18:59
Speaker
2020, the amount of interest we got was absolutely incredible.
00:19:03
Speaker
And that's led to lots of opportunities like the American Historical Review, where we've done a series of articles with them that's included the first ever published smell in a historical journal with its own DOI, right?
00:19:14
Speaker
So, you know, we've been able to do this extra stuff that we never planned in the first place, but has, I think, pushed the field forward in really interesting ways.
00:19:24
Speaker
But the main outputs that we kind of planned to do, which we've also managed to do in the time that we've had, the Smell Explorer, which is, as I've said before, the kind of big data set online where people can browse all of the text data that we've gathered and image data that we've gathered.
00:19:40
Speaker
So that has millions of references on it and people can freely use that online and there'll be a link in the show notes for people to look at that.
00:19:49
Speaker
We are hoping in the future we'll be able to add more data to that.
00:19:53
Speaker
The problem is, of course, with anything like this is it costs time and money to process data to put more in.
00:19:58
Speaker
But there's already another project going on called Poem in the Netherlands, which is all about early modern English literature and poetry and smell.
00:20:08
Speaker
And we're hoping to integrate more data from that project into the Explorer.
00:20:14
Speaker
And then the other things we've done, we've got the Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, which I've kind of been the editor-in-chief of, which is an ever-expanding resource.
00:20:24
Speaker
And we very much plan to keep adding entries to that.
00:20:27
Speaker
So if you want to write about a smell or a particular nose and way of smelling in the past or a particular kind of place or smellscape, then please do get in touch with me.
00:20:38
Speaker
Very happy to welcome more entries to that.
00:20:41
Speaker
But the encyclopedia also has, alongside the entries, what we call storylines, which are a way of representing smell, not just in the form of a kind of linear text, as you would get in a kind of article or a book, but in the form of kind of interactive hypertext stories.
00:21:01
Speaker
So we use the open source tool Twine, which some listeners may be familiar with, that basically allows you to create digital choose-your-own-adventure type stories, and
00:21:10
Speaker
as a way to create stories that kind of you could use smell to leap between different places and times in the past, right?
00:21:17
Speaker
And kind of making real use of smells full potential there to crisscross across times and places.
00:21:23
Speaker
So there are lots of storylines for people to explore in the encyclopedia as well.
00:21:27
Speaker
And then there's the olfactory storytelling toolkit, which is kind of really...
00:21:33
Speaker
an attempt to give people the resources, particularly in museums and heritage sites, to integrate more smell into their practice.
00:21:41
Speaker
And so that contains lots of advice on kind of how to find stories that you can tell about or with smell in your collections about how to kind of work to create smells and then diffuse them in a space, different diffusion methods that people might want to use, for example.
00:21:57
Speaker
And also,
00:21:59
Speaker
has information on kind of the risks to be aware of, right?
00:22:02
Speaker
Because lots of conservators and other people are quite nervous about using smells in museum spaces.
00:22:07
Speaker
So that's like a 200 and something page PDF that you can download online.
00:22:14
Speaker
But there's also a series of resources connected to that that people can use, for example, to create smell walks around their own museums and heritage sites or cards that they can use to kind of do storyboarding to think about smell in their collections and how they can still tell stories with smell.
00:22:32
Speaker
And then the final thing, I guess, that
00:22:34
Speaker
the final big kind of public facing thing that we've produced, which is at the moment accessible to fewer people because it's not online.
00:22:43
Speaker
And one of the beauties of smell is that it frequently resists digitization in an ever more online and virtual world.
00:22:50
Speaker
But the final example is, is something that I can show,
00:22:55
Speaker
on camera but you won't be able to see because you're listening to this but what i've what i've produced is this magical box and um it contains 12 different scents uh that we've worked on with perfumers um during the project
00:23:12
Speaker
recreations of different historical smellscapes or smells, some of which were kind of very much imaginary sort of creative interpretations.
00:23:23
Speaker
So we've got the smell of hell in there, which is based on looking at the way the smell of hell is described in 17th century sermons and then working with a perfumer to interpret them.
00:23:34
Speaker
Some of them are kind of more based on looking at recipes.
00:23:36
Speaker
So we've got Pomanda and perfume gloves in there, both kind of based around an interpretation of early modern recipes.
00:23:43
Speaker
So it's a real range of different scents.
00:23:45
Speaker
And the aim is to give those kits to museums and then to work with them on integrating them into some of their curating and education practices in an attempt to get smell into more.
00:24:00
Speaker
Into more people's lives, right?
00:24:02
Speaker
And all of this, the toolkit, the smell kit, they're all based on things that we did during the project as well.
00:24:09
Speaker
So we had a kind of smell tours that we arranged with smells at Ulm Museum in Germany.
00:24:15
Speaker
We did a whole workshop on malodors and kind of how to use, which was partly about, you know, how do we use bad smells in a heritage context?
00:24:23
Speaker
And of course, we started during the pandemic.
00:24:25
Speaker
So we kind of had to innovate and use some different methods to get smells to people.
00:24:30
Speaker
And so some of that material has ended up in the toolkit as well.
00:24:35
Speaker
Different ways to distribute scents to people for events.
00:24:40
Speaker
So it's all based on those three years of experience and research.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:45
Speaker
So yeah, there'll be links in the show notes.
00:24:47
Speaker
Please do look at the Encyclopedia and the Smell Explorer and download the toolkit.
00:24:52
Speaker
And if you do look at them or use them, then get in touch with us and let us know what you do with them.
00:24:59
Speaker
That's fantastic.
00:25:00
Speaker
That box is very impressive.
00:25:03
Speaker
It really is a little magical box of smells that you are enjoying.
00:25:09
Speaker
Will that be available for anyone to try to get a hold of?
00:25:13
Speaker
Or is that exclusively for museums?
00:25:16
Speaker
So at the moment, it's exclusively for partners that we're working with and the people who attended our kind of big end event, which was in Amsterdam last week.
00:25:24
Speaker
But we're also doing something else with the box and the smells in that they're going to be preserved in the Osmotech.
00:25:31
Speaker
So for those who don't know what the Osmotech is, it's essentially the world's largest archive of perfumes.
00:25:39
Speaker
and they,
How Has Odaropa Changed Tullett's Perspective?
00:25:41
Speaker
Oda Roper and the Osmotech have collaborated so that the Osmotech can begin to host a heritage smell collection there, which will include our smells and hopefully in the future more smells with the scents themselves and the documentation that we've produced with them.
00:26:00
Speaker
The hope is that
00:26:02
Speaker
more places like the Osmotech will begin to kind of preserve smells as well and that in the end will encourage a culture where archived smells are publicly accessible to people on a wider basis in the way that say video or text or audio are.
00:26:18
Speaker
I think we've got a long way until we can get to that position but that's kind of like a much longer term goal for us.
00:26:25
Speaker
Has anything surprised you or the team as you have been working on Oda Ropa?
00:26:31
Speaker
Have you come across anything, whether it's a smell or a story or a description or any new conclusions?
00:26:40
Speaker
They've just really knocked everyone's socks off.
00:26:46
Speaker
I mean, it's always very difficult to answer, isn't it?
00:26:48
Speaker
When you're somebody who's kind of like...
00:26:53
Speaker
knee deep in a subject area, stuff that you will find fascinating and that knocks your socks off will probably be quite boring to lots of other people and seem like a kind of minor discovery.
00:27:04
Speaker
But I think that the thing for me that has been really interesting and surprising.
00:27:16
Speaker
So the first thing has been the public reaction to it, which has been
00:27:20
Speaker
really welcoming and really engaged and really fascinated with what we're doing in a way that I'm not sure I expect is.
00:27:29
Speaker
And I think hopefully that will open up opportunities for more people to do this kind of work, because it will encourage more researchers to go into the field.
00:27:38
Speaker
In terms of the actual research, though, I think that one of the things that I wouldn't say it was surprising to me, but which I think the project has really allowed us to do, is to tell a richer variety of stories about smell and its histories than more.
00:27:54
Speaker
were otherwise kind of there in the historiography before.
00:27:58
Speaker
So, you know, a lot of the work pre-Odoropa had kind of focused on one of two things, perfume and its histories or sanitation and public health.
00:28:09
Speaker
And so it was either the fecal or the fragrant, and that was kind of your choice.
00:28:15
Speaker
And I think one of the things that has been really nice about Oda Roper is it's given us the opportunity and the resources to explore a series of other stories.
00:28:24
Speaker
And for me, that work has involved kind of opening up new questions about the history of animals and smell that I hadn't really thought about before.
00:28:31
Speaker
You know, one of the things I found really interesting on going through our material was just the sheer amount of stuff about the care of animals and being sensitive to animal sensitivities around smell in not just in kind of 16th, 17th century sources, but all the way through into the late 19th century.
00:28:48
Speaker
And I think there's so much work to be done there.
00:28:52
Speaker
And that's something I'm going to be working on in my next project.
00:28:55
Speaker
But also stories about
00:28:58
Speaker
about war and, and, and conflicts.
00:29:01
Speaker
That was another kind of area that I thought was, came out a lot in the source material that we'd, we'd collected and the relationship between war and smell over time.
00:29:11
Speaker
Um, but I think there's a final thing that did surprise me is that the project has completely changed my attitude to my methodology.
00:29:20
Speaker
How so?
00:29:22
Speaker
So, so basically when I started, uh, the project, um,
00:29:28
Speaker
I was very much of the mindset of a lot of other sensory historians like Mark Smith, which is that, well, we can never really reconstruct what it was like in the past.
00:29:38
Speaker
And there's no real point in using our noses.
00:29:41
Speaker
You know, it's all about text.
00:29:42
Speaker
It's all about language.
00:29:45
Speaker
There's no point in actually engaging our own senses.
00:29:48
Speaker
And indeed, that's kind of what I say in the introduction to my first book.
00:29:52
Speaker
And now, thanks to this project and thanks to working with not just the computer scientists and the heritage chemists and scientists, but also working a lot more with creative practitioners and artists, with perfumers and flavour and fragrance specialists,
00:30:10
Speaker
it's kind of completely upturned that viewpoint.
00:30:12
Speaker
And now I've ended up publishing a whole book that basically argues we should use our noses, you know, and that there's a lot to be gained by smelling stuff and that maybe we should publish smells instead of publishing books.
00:30:23
Speaker
Maybe that would be a more exciting and interesting way to engage people with the past that's still based in scholarly research.
00:30:29
Speaker
So I think actually the big surprise for me has been that working with all of these wonderful people and collaborating across disciplines and outside of academia has completely changed how I see my field and how I see research.
00:30:45
Speaker
There is something to be said for that more widely for historians, actually.
00:30:51
Speaker
A lot of academics and historians are some of the worst examples of this, tend to assume that their understanding of the modern world is kind of just like how the modern world is.
00:31:01
Speaker
And so then they compare, say, the early modern world with that, right?
00:31:04
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:31:05
Speaker
And that's kind of led into all kinds of weird assumptions about smell, including the idea that we live in a less smelly and more deodorized world today than we did in the past.
00:31:16
Speaker
Now, you can say that if you're an academic in an air-conditioned office.
00:31:21
Speaker
that's regularly cleaned by underpaid cleaners.
00:31:26
Speaker
It's rather more difficult to say that we live in a deodorized world if you live next to one of the massive waste dumps that we have here in the UK, or if you live in the south of the United States next to a paper pulping plant, right?
00:31:39
Speaker
So I think, yeah, that's the thing that's really come out of the project for me is just working with a much more diverse range of people who have a much more diverse range of sensory experiences.
00:31:50
Speaker
And that has made me kind of question how I do my work and how I should do it in the future.
00:31:55
Speaker
It's a very long answer, but I think, you know, actually that was the thing that surprised me the most.
00:32:02
Speaker
Well, I think this is a perfect tie in to a final question.
00:32:08
Speaker
So say someone who's listening to this podcast episode is thinking, learning about historical smells sounds absolutely amazing.
00:32:17
Speaker
How do I do that?
00:32:20
Speaker
What do I do next?
00:32:22
Speaker
What do you recommend?
00:32:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd say, if you're thinking about learning more about the history of smell and about historical smells and how to engage with the pass through smell, congratulations, you've made the right decision.
00:32:34
Speaker
You've listened to this podcast correctly.
00:32:36
Speaker
So well done.
00:32:39
Speaker
I think that the first thing I would say is just pay attention to the smells around you, actually.
00:32:45
Speaker
So one of the things that I try to do in the new book is I have olfactory figures, which are just moments in the book when I say, go and smell this thing that might be in your cupboard, right?
00:32:55
Speaker
Because lots of the smells that are around us every day have a much, much deeper history than perhaps we appreciate.
00:33:02
Speaker
And I mean, one example of that and the kind of specificity of those histories is wintergreen.
00:33:08
Speaker
So wintergreen is a kind of smell and flavour that is in...
00:33:13
Speaker
lots of different products.
00:33:14
Speaker
In the 1960s and 70s, they found out that people in the UK
Engaging with Historical Smells
00:33:19
Speaker
hated the smell of wintergreen.
00:33:20
Speaker
It was one of their least favorite smells.
00:33:22
Speaker
In the US, it was one of the most liked smells, most preferred smells.
00:33:27
Speaker
And the reason for that was because wintergreen was in loads of medical stuff in the UK.
00:33:31
Speaker
And in the US, it was in root beer and candy, right?
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:34
Speaker
So what I'm saying is if you kind of start at the tip of your nose and think about, well, why do I like this particular smell, right?
00:33:42
Speaker
Why is this smell important to me?
00:33:44
Speaker
And use that as a kind of road into thinking about
00:33:50
Speaker
your relationship to the past through smell, I think is the first thing I would suggest.
00:33:54
Speaker
But then there's so much great material that's been published in the field.
00:33:58
Speaker
And there are various ways that you can kind of get an introduction to it.
00:34:04
Speaker
We published a conversation piece in the American Historical Review, which is free to access.
00:34:10
Speaker
And there's
00:34:11
Speaker
that's a really nice introduction to the field.
00:34:14
Speaker
But also there's a whole online bibliography that I've curated of over 700 entries.
00:34:21
Speaker
So if you want a kind of giant reading list to start and to pick out something that might interest you, look out for the past sent bibliography, which you can find on the Ola Roper website for information on how to look at that.
00:34:36
Speaker
But finally, I mean, one other thing you can do is
00:34:39
Speaker
do what lots of people I suspect on this podcast do, which is do things like recreate recipes, right?
00:34:44
Speaker
I mean, before we came on air, I was suggesting that, you know, one of the nice things about doing this with the recipes project is that I think lots of people who are interested in historical recipes are much more minded to be welcoming to ideas about reconstruction.
00:35:01
Speaker
And yeah, just find a historical recipe and try and remake it and think about what
00:35:07
Speaker
You know, what do the different materials that are going into that recipe smell like individually?
00:35:12
Speaker
What does the process smell like?
00:35:13
Speaker
What does the end result smell like?
00:35:16
Speaker
Just doing some basic material engagement with actual stuff, I think is really important.
00:35:22
Speaker
Because I could sit here and recommend you loads of stuff to go and read.
00:35:26
Speaker
But I think it's actually more important you engage your nose than engage your eyes as a kind of route into this.
00:35:33
Speaker
Everyone heard it here first.
00:35:34
Speaker
Just go out and smell things.
00:35:35
Speaker
That's
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:35:36
Speaker
all you need to do to get started.
00:35:37
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:35:39
Speaker
Well, thank you so much.
00:35:42
Speaker
This was a great conversation.
00:35:44
Speaker
Thank you for joining me today to talk about Oda Ropa.
00:35:48
Speaker
No problem at all.
00:35:48
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:35:50
Speaker
Thanks to everyone for listening today.
00:35:53
Speaker
Please remember to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode.
00:35:57
Speaker
I'll see you again next time on Around the Table.