Announcing the Odeuropa Network

We are delighted to share a new initiative with you today: the Odeuropa Network. From the moment our project was announced in November last year, we’ve been excited and honoured to receive a steady stream of emails (to date, over 150) from people who wanted to explore opportunities for collaboration, share their own work and research, or who simply wished to learn more about our project. Over time, these messages began to reveal fascinating new clusters of olfactory expertise to us – from archaeobotanists and architects, to linguists, perfumers, artists, chemists, and historians. Frustratingly, we simply don’t have the resources to pursue even a fraction of these opportunities in the context of the already carefully planned and budgeted Odeuropa research project. But happily, we are in a position where we can enable our contacts to learn of each other’s interests and expertise, connect with each other, and create their own olfactory partnerships and collaborations. Hence the Odeuropa Network, a searchable, public directory hosted on the Odeuropa website, with basic information on individuals and institutions interested in olfactory heritage and sensory data mining.

To become a member of the network, please fill-out this online form where you can list your basic information, interests, and expertise in the public members’ directory and also sign-up for our upcoming newsletter to keep up to date with Odeuropa’s events and activities. The online form will be kept open and the directory will be curated and updated on an ongoing basis by the Odeuropa project team. Our goal is to publish the first version of the directory in just a week or two. We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity!

Update (22/6/21): You can now view current members of the Odeuropa Network on an interactive map.

Submit your work: First International Workshop on Multisensory Data & Knowledge

Together with the Polifonia team, we’re organising a workshop on Multisensory Data & Knowledge to take place in conjunction with the Language Data and Knowledge conference in September. The goal of this workshop is to advance our understanding of how smells and music are represented in texts and structured data. The topics we want to address revolve around extracting references to smells, music, context, and visual information from text as well as relevant data describing their cultural, historical and political context, and model them in the form of interlinked knowledge graphs. This research has a strong interdisciplinary character, hence the workshop has the potential to attract researchers from diverse disciplines from both social sciences and humanities and computer science. Its potential impact is significant to many application areas including: preservation and valorisation of cultural heritage, data-driven policy making in cultural heritage, urban planning, artistic performances, applications for scholars in musicology and history, applications for museums, innovation in teaching, maintenance and exploitation of large catalogues, archives and libraries.

We invite long papers between 10 and 15 pages and short papers between 6 to 8 pages. Note that this workshop is organised following the computer science conference/publication culture, so initial submissions are expected to be in a near publishable state and will be reviewed by three reviewers. Accepted papers will be published through ceur-ws.org.

Submission deadline: 23 April 2021, the workshop will take place on 1 September.

More information on the workshop: https://odeuropa.github.io/mdk21/