NOTA BENE NEWS
July 24, 2023
In many ways Orbis has always been the heart and soul of Nota Bene, and with version 14 it has taken a huge step forward by being made both much easier to use, and more powerful. If you are not familiar with Orbis, take a look at the new Popup Orbis in version 14. New users will find it easy to get started, and experienced users will develop an ever more sophisticated system for data analysis.
To show you how the new Orbis can transform your research, Friend of the company and historian and academic administrator Mark Szuchman has created two new videos:
We have learned over the years that, when discussing Orbis, different users see different angles and advantages in deploying its research powers. Here are three takes — two from those of us at Nota Bene, and one from a user — on what drives excitement in the use of the enhanced and newly engineered Orbis that comes with Nota Bene 14.
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| Popup Orbis is Now Much Easier to Use
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In earlier versions of Nota Bene, Orbis had a bit of a learning curve. Some users put Orbis on the back burner, sadly missing the wonderful power of this research tool. Now, the Orbis experience is much more user-friendly. The new Popup Orbis is docked next to your open document, and it provides you with Automatic Textbases — no need to create your own textbase. You can search all of the files in the current folder (with or without subfolders), or all of the 100 most recently edited NB files, or your Ibidem note-taking files, or a couple of other automatically available textbases.
Once you start to love Orbis, you will probably want to create your own textbase, and explore some of the advanced features. With NB 14, the process of creating a textbase (i.e., defining the set of folders/files to be searched) is easier and more intuitive.
The result of all these changes is that the Orbis learning curve has been cut way back, and the power of Orbis is more accessible. Just open Popup Orbis, select one of the Automatic Textbases, and enter your search terms. Find long-forgotten notes, make new associations, and use retrieved text (with citations, if any) in the paper you are writing. So easy!
Anne
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| Popup Orbis is a Sophisticated & Powerful Research System
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The immediacy of this application — by virtue of its compact footprint, it becomes virtually part of the word processor — makes the function of tagging documents with Orbis keywords a seamless, flowing experience. While Orbis can search your texts without being marked up in any way, its power to do even more refined searches can be easily extended, something I invariably do by tagging texts using Special Orbis keywords, specifically employing the @ character.
Popup Orbis makes this process even easier by dispensing with having to type "@" altogether: I simply type my desired Special Orbis keywords directly. I enter them in particular at the start of paragraphs in my Ibidem-generated note-taking files. And I'm always conscious of using single words or two-word strings that, in my view, conceptualize the contents of paragraph. For example, if I'm taking notes on something that involves the press and journalists, in the context of debates surrounding some government policies, I would enter the string "public sphere" as one of my Special Orbis Keywords. And since there is no limit to the number of keywords that can be entered, I'm not limited to tagging the entire document, which would negate the more nuanced search results we researchers would normally want. Instead, Popup Orbis invites me, by its immediate access and fluidity, to enter summary concepts and ideas, as I envision them, in specific contexts anywhere and everywhere in my note-taking files. And when I need to search, Popup Orbis remains there, compactly ready with its search-and-retrieve engine.
Nota Bene User
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| The Heart of Nota Bene — Now Accessible to Everyone
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The vision that animates Nota Bene 14 is to make Orbis so simple, so fast, so automatic, and so accessible that now everybody — whether Orbis novice, who has never even opened it before, or those who have had their academic careers shaped by things they discovered using it — will now find it to be indispensable on a regular basis. By making Orbis instant and always at hand, its use effortless, whether simply finding passages lost in the distant past, or reshaping arguments by encountering texts culled from tens of thousands of files, your imagination is free to explore. Democratizing the benefits derived from Orbis is what delights me.
That's all that really needs to be said. But those interested in why this matters to me might find the Nota Bene origin story interesting, precisely because from the very beginning Orbis has been at the heart of the Nota Bene vision. When designing Nota Bene — precipitated by needs encountered when writing my PhD dissertation — sophisticated footnoting and bibliographic capabilities were foundational, of course. But both tasks could be done manually, even if laboriously. What was most essential was something that no amount of manual effort could provide — the ability to find texts in previous papers and notes written or accumulated from other sources and then display them in a succinct keyword-in-context format that made them easily accessible. The hope was that — by viewing the way words were used, and arguments made, in disparate texts retrieved from relative obscurity and produced in different contexts — I could start to see things just a little bit differently.
That's what Orbis made possible, as many in the Nota Bene community quickly discovered. It helped the late Ronald Bruzina encounter something "astonishing" that reshaped the argument in his book on Husserl's assistant Eugene Fink, and it enabled Mark Cohen to find things he hadn't seen before in his work on Jewish practices in medieval Egypt. Countless others have similarly used Orbis in their academic research, writing repeated "thank you for developing Orbis" notes, capped off by a poetic "Nota Bene is the king of word processors, but its crown jewel is Orbis." The goal of NB 14 is to put those riches in the hands of everyone.
Steve
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Steve Siebert
Anne Putnam
Nota Bene
718-382-1500
www.notabene.com
sales@notabene.com
technicalsupport@notabene.com
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