How to geo-tag your Foldscope post using novo-map plugin

Dec 02, 2018 • 4:23 PM UTC

California, USA

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Fungi

Manu Prakash

I am a faculty at Stanford and run the Prakash Lab at Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Foldscope community is at the heart of our Frugal Science movement - and I can not tell you how proud I am of this community and grassroots movement. Find our work here: http://prakashlab.stanford.edu

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All,
We have been planning to enable the mapping feature on all foldscope posts for a while – and I finally got around to testing some plugins; so now all of us can mark exact location of where the samples were collected. That’s important, when you discover a new species, new habitat, want to run experiments when you need to know where exactly the samples came from – and in general share where the work is actually being done (which country, state, village, street..).
Here are 3 simple steps to geo-yah all your posts:
Step 1) make your regular post on microcosmos as usual. Hit publish.
Step 2) click edit post; and go to the bottom of the post – and they will see a feature to tag the location on a map and I will also add some category geo/tag pins at a later time – but right now, this will be a default pin.
Step 3) once you are happy with the latitude/longitude you have picked – by finding your place on the maps; just click “add marker” button – and it’s done. If you want to find the exact GPS coordinates of your location, simply use google maps on a web browser; and find your location. Click on it and the latitude and longitude numbers would show up. Copy/paste them in the above field.
I am attaching a series of images of how I did this for an old post of mine. Feel free to ask any questions; if you have any.

Please do try to geo-yah your posts; since very soon we will turn in a feature where you can read foldscope posts based on a location. Say you could zoom in on Rajasthan or Manipur in India, or Kansas in the US; or anywhere for that matter and be able to browse all the posts coming from that location. If you want to preserve/protect your exact location; you can put a pin at a nearby location. Below is an example of what the front end would look like – I am excited to see; since last night the feature is on; almost 12 posts have come from north east area alone. Without geo-tagging, we could have never been able to tell that before.

Soon, we will also update tags with categories; so you will be able to filter posts by category (day physics or biology) or anything else for that matter.
Enjoy tagging and always keep exploring.
Cheers
Manu