Dr. Marieke van Erp
KNAW Humanities Cluster
28 February 2025, 13.00-14.00 GMT
Smell is an underexplored topic in history and computer science. However, the mass-scale digitisation of historical sources provides us with many clues as to what the past smelled like – if you know how to find them. In this talk, I will present the interdisciplinary computational methods developed in the H2020 Odeuropa project to see, read and organise smells. To make this happen, a team of computer vision, language technology and semantic web experts worked with historians and museologists to make the computational tools as historically informed as possible. In this way, they processed over 43,000 images and 62,000 texts to create an openly available database of smell references that can be used by researchers and the public alike to investigate European smells of the past 4 centuries.
About the presenter
Marieke van Erp is a Language Technology and Semantic Web expert engaged in interdisciplinary research. She holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Tilburg University and has worked on many (inter)national interdisciplinary projects. Since 2017, she has been leading the Digital Humanities Research Lab at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Humanities Cluster. She is one of the founders and scientific directors of the Cultural AI Lab, a collaboration between 8 research and cultural heritage institutions in the Netherlands aimed at the study, design and development of socio-technological AI systems that are aware of the subtle and subjective complexity of human culture. In January 2023, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator project that will investigate how language and semantic web technologies can improve the creation of knowledge graphs supporting humanities research.