A Novel Approach to Visualizing Olfactory Landscapes

Abstract

This article focuses on the exploration and mapping of olfactory landscapes. For this purpose, a brief introduction to the social and cultural significance of odors in the 'Western world', especially in the sciences and philosophy, is first given and the visuality paradigm of these societies is highlighted. Subsequently, olfactory landscapes are integrated into a basic social constructivist-phenomenological concept to create a theoretical basis for the discussion of these special landscapes. This is accompanied by a brief discussion of current approaches to smellscape survey and the particular mapping approach of Kate McLean (in comparison with the here used approach), which forms the basis for the mapping and presentation presented here. This presented approach was developed and tested in a master's thesis on the smellscape of Christmas and Christmas markets. An extended signature system and the detailed procedure for a smellwalk are presented.