ORBIS
THE NOTE-RETRIEVAL & INFORMATION-PROCESSING MODULE
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Instantly search everything you’ve written—without needing to have designated keywords
Includes notes, book-length manuscripts, character sketches for a novel, transcriptions of interviews, aphorisms, material downloaded from the web or brought into NB—in up to 8 million files!
Find exactly the paragraph (or other unit)—not just the file—you are looking for
Look up the current word instantly, or type in more sophisticated searches
Use wildcards & connectors such as “and,” “or,” and “not”; or user-defined synonyms
View all the matches in a concordance-style table view
See as much context (entries before and after the match) as desired
Find long-lost text—or discover new connections as texts are brought into new relationships
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LISTEN TO YOUR COLLEAGUES . . .
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“Orbis is a wonderful, wonderful program.”
Professor, Middlebury College
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“Orbis really is an incredibly powerful tool. You've no idea how helpful it has been to my colleague and me. By dint of typing up everything we could find by Ambrose Bierce (> 4,000,000 words, and yes, typed), we were able to use Orbis to find numerous unsigned works by him in the San Fransisco newspapers, and conversely to identify the original pieces that went into . . .his Collected Works. Without Nota Bene, and most especially Orbis, we'd probably still be sifting through all the material accumulated, and even then missing much of it. I've also used Orbis to date otherwise undated letters by H. P. Lovecraft based on content. . . . Orbis kinda makes research fun, if you can imagine that. Sure you can. It takes the drudgery out of the work, and helps me to be insightful—to see stuff I might not otherwise have thought about or that otherwise would be too difficult to see.”
David Schultz — researcher (self described “office worker, and not a academic, theologian, or linguist”)
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“Orbis is spectacular. . . . I cannot imagine doing [most recent work on Galileo] without Orbis. It’s the reason why I got NB in the first place. . . . I don’t think that I could have done this without Orbis. . . . I took notes for the last 15 years without knowing how they would be used. . . . It’s been marvelous.”
Historian of science, University of Colorado
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“I should really tell you too about how crucial Nota Bene was in sorting through the thousands of hand-written note pages by the Eugen Fink of my study of Husserl and Fink. These are what were totally unknown to the philosophic (i.e., phenomenology) public, and no one had read them before, except for a few sampled by a then new acquaintance from Belgium who had seen the mass the summer before I did, but had not time to look very far. I typed [it all in, and] then I made searches in Orbis by theme, amassing folders of printed out texts on each theme, and then I went through them, referring always to the fuller context of each text unit . . . pulled out by Orbis. That is how I began to see what was being done, in the way themes unfolded in their sense on the one hand, and on the other how they integrated with everything else. Nota Bene made it possible to discover the contribution Fink was making, beyond the few papers he published or the typed drafts he produced for Husserl.
It was an astonishing revelation.”
Ronald Bruzina — professor of philosophy, University of Kentucky
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