Smelly Maps

Smelly Maps



 four researchers - Daniele Quercia, Luca Maria Aiello, Rossano Schifanella, and Kate McLean - have recently proposed a new way of capturing the entire urban smellscape from social media data. They run smell walks in seven cities in UK, Europe, and USA and, in so doing, collected smell-related words. Locals were asked to walk around their city, identify distinct odors, and take notes. Smell descriptors were taken verbatim from the smell walkers’ original hand-written notes.

The researchers then matched the smell related words with social media data (tags on Flickr pictures and tweets) for the cities of London and Barcelona. To structure this large and apparently unrelated dataset of smell words, they built a co-occurrence network where nodes are smell words and undirected edges are weighted with the number of times the two words co-occur in the same items. The result of this process is the first urban smell dictionary containing 285 English terms.