This is the main page for the master thesis "Fragrant Words: Fragrant Words: Analyzing the Intersection of Smell, Emotion, and Culture in the Middle East Through English Texts"
The sense of smell is crucial in shaping human sensory experiences. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen significant advancements in identifying and understanding scents, but the focus has largely been on their chemical composition rather than exploring their textual descriptions. Exploring heritage data through semantic web, text mining, and image recognition offers a novel approach to uncovering olfactory experiences. The Middle East, with its deep cultural and historical significance, presents a rich area for such literary investigation. However, European narratives about Middle Eastern scents are probably affected by colonial biases. Additionally, there is a notable scarcity of studies on Middle Eastern olfactory experiences within the field. Therefore, this study sets out to analyze European olfactory heritage data related to the Middle East, focusing on the specific scents mentioned and their associated emotions utilizing sentiment analysis techniques. Utilizing Odeuropa's database, this research zeroes in on English-language texts about Middle Eastern olfactory experiences. The goal is to illuminate how European literature has depicted the Middle Eastern olfactory landscape, thereby contributing new insights into sensory heritage and deepening the understanding of how smell is interwoven with cultural and historical narratives.
All the coding material will be uploaded here, the dataset is included in the all_languages folder, zipped to make it smaller. If to be used you will need to unzip.
Not as of the time this README is updated, all the packages should be imported in the beginning of the jupyter notebook, so if it fails you are missing those packages.