Presentations at the AAG

At the AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco, I presented ongoing work entitled “Grammar of olfactory imagination: Linguistic and spatial logics of smell, memory, and place.” The presentation asks a deceptively simple question: when people remember a smell, how do they also reconstruct a place?

Urban research has long relied on functional and visual accounts of the city. Smell is harder to hold still. It is often recalled through a source, a setting, an activity, or an emotion rather than described on its own. This project takes that difficulty seriously and examines how olfactory memories are organized through language and drawing.

Using more than 500 visitor entries from the Scent Library at the Rubin Museum of Art, I combined thematic and semantic coding with text mining and image analysis. The analysis develops two connected grammars of olfactory imagination: a linguistic grammar linking smell, place, and emotion, and a spatial grammar describing how remembered smell scenes are arranged.

Abstract

Cities are often understood through their functional and visual dimensions, while everyday sensory experiences that shape how people feel in urban spaces remain largely underexplored. Among these, smell is a particularly understudied sense, even though it connects closely with emotion, memory and place. Historically, smells have been treated as nuisances to be removed through zoning and environmental regulations. Such practices risk the homogenization of urban environments, potentially diluting the emotional and cultural ties that link people to place. This study posits smells as an important aspect of urban wellbeing and sensory richness. To build toward this olfactory lens, the study examines over 500 visitor entries from the Scent Library at the Rubin Museum of Art, where participants recalled their smell memories through paired texts and drawings. We combined thematic and semantic coding with text mining and image analysis to identify recurring patterns in how people express smell experience. These analyses form the basis for a dual grammar of olfactory imagination—one linguistic and one spatial—that reveals the mental syntax through which smell mediates memory and attachment. Specifically, the linguistic grammar constructs a co-occurrence matrix that captures a triadic relationship among smell objects, spatial anchors and emotions, while the spatial grammar maps scene logics aligned with Lynch’s typologies of path, nodes and edges. Together, the results show how olfactory imagination produces its own cognitive syntax linking everyday experience, extending the visual discourse in urban studies and contributing another building block to the growing body of multisensory experience research.

The spatial grammar treats each drawing as more than an illustration accompanying a written memory. Drawing on Lynch’s spatial typologies, it identifies elements such as smell sources, action anchors, smell fields, boundaries, and paths. These elements describe where a smell is encountered, where it begins or fades, and how a person moves toward or through it.

The linguistic grammar represents a smell memory as a triadic relation among a smell object, a spatial anchor, and an emotion. Organizing these relations as a smell-place-emotion tensor makes it possible to examine which sensory objects, settings, and emotional registers repeatedly occur together.

The emotional dimension is not reduced to a single positive-negative scale. Clustering across valence, arousal, self-identity, and temporality reveals six recurring configurations: nostalgia, love and affection, longing and yearning, fear and anxiety, belonging and home identity, and calm and serenity.

Taken together, the flows among smell, place, and emotion show that olfactory memories are relational rather than isolated sensory impressions. Residential and geographically meaningful settings are especially visible in memories of belonging and nostalgia, while other smell-place combinations connect to affection, calm, longing, or anxiety.

Co-organizing the GISER Symposium

Alongside my own presentation, I co-organized the GISER Symposium, a sequence of four paper sessions on “Sensing Human Experiences with Emerging Geospatial Methods” and a concluding panel on the “Future of Human-centered Geospatial AI.” Across the symposium, researchers considered how emerging geospatial methods can help study human experience, perception, and activity in space and place, while also opening a broader discussion about where human-centered GeoAI should go next.

Conference Reference

Chen, Q. (2026). Grammar of olfactory imagination: Linguistic and spatial logics of smell, memory, and place. AAG Annual Meeting, March 17-21, San Francisco, California, United States.

Links: Presentation abstract (PDF) · Talks page