More than the Name of the Rose How to Make Computers Read, See, and Organize Smells

We are all familiar with the famous Shakespearian statement that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Yet throughout history the scent of the rose has absorbed, as if by a kind of magnetic attraction, a multitude of meanings. It has often been the flower of power. Contained in expensive casting bottles, the scent of rose oil (commonly known as rose attar) was distributed to the mistresses of Henry VIII. The potent scent evoked an intimacy with the body of the monarch and was a representation of Tudor rule. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European visitors to the Ottoman Empire noted the use of rose-water, sprinkled on the hands, to welcome guests in an expression of hospitality. The corpses of medieval men and women who emitted the odor of sanctity instead of pungent putrefaction were often said to smell of roses. The scent of the rose has also been central to Islam: the first rose supposedly bloomed from the tear of the Prophet, and the indispensability of rose water in Islamic culture has left its impact in material culture in the form of the gulab, a rounded bottle with an elongated spout for pouring the perfume. The rose has never merely smelled sweet; it has evoked a whole range of meanings.1