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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“Since I learned about Orbis, I use Nota Bene to help me manage my novels. I’ve been able to discard all my structure control systems and work directly
with words.”
Carolivia Herron, author Thereafter Johnnie, Nappy Hair, Always An
Olivia
librettist, Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson
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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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“I certainly rely heavily on Orbis. I have 12 megs of research notes, which I have been building up since I began using Nota Bene (ver. 2) in 1985. I also use Orbis to index all my old email and correspondence. I strongly recommend that new scholars (or veteran scholars beginning new projects) invest a little bit of time getting to know Orbis and planning a notetaking strategy to make maximum use of it. But then again, if a researcher already has begun taking notes on computer, Orbis will happily research every word and help find those references one can’t quite put one's finger on.”
Dr. Gerald W. Schlabach —Theology Department, University of St. Thomas
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“I began using Nota Bene in 1986, and at that time I started to put all of my notes on the various things I was reading into files, with the express intent of being able to search them through NB's "textbase" program. I now have fourteen years worth of notes, and regularly use Orbis to consult this resource when I'm looking for information on a particular topic.”
Dr. Lawrence Zbikowski — Department of Music, University of Chicago
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“I use Orbis all the time when I am writing, I keep documents and interview transcripts on my computer, put it on Orbis, and then when I am writing check quotes, dates, look for arguments pro and con, using Orbis as I go. It is a major reason I stick with Note Bene when all my colleagues are using a different word processor. Of course I love Ibidem as well, saves me hours and hours of hunting references.”
Irene Rubin, Ph.D. — Political Science Department, Northern Illinois University
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“I've found Orbis to be a life saver. I just published a book based on 8000 (eight thousand) pages of interviews that I coded and put out as an Orbis data base. Orbis allowed me to handle that much data, put out subfiles grouped by coded topic (that then turned into sections in chapters) and then when verifying stuff allowed instant checking of material. I love it.”
Herbert J. Rubin, Ph.D. — Sociology Department, Northern Illinois University
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“I bought NB for Lingua, but it is Orbis which has prevented me from even contemplating another word processer -- and it is Orbis which I highlight when I recommend NB to friends. Orbis practically wrote my dissertation for me. Okay, I exagerate a little, but it enabled me to retrieve information gathered during a year in the archives and to make connections I had not anticipated. My Orbis textbase has been growing with me as my research advances. I don't know whether I love the power of Orbis or its flexibility more. ”
Dr. Elka Klein — Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
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“I have many things which I love in Nota Bene. I am completing a PhD in Pauline studies and I do not have the courage to think of such a project without having the power of NB at hand. When I say this, I think especially of the power of Orbis and Ibidem. My huge databases (over 1,300,000 words in my Orbis textbase and over 9,000 bibliographical references in my Ibidem database) make life so easy even at this level of research. Who on earth is able to keep in mind at the level of the detail what he/she read six months ago? There is only one answer: Orbis!”
Sorin Sabou, Ph.D. candidate — London Bible College, Brunel University
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“Where the **** are my notes????” The pleasures of Orbis: You see them everywhere: at the libraries, in the archives, in their offices, at the parks (both on the grass and on the benches), at busy street corners of our cities, and in the pastoral settings of our countrysides. People typing on their computers, usually laptops. They are the modern-day scribes, taking notes on their reading, jotting down ideas, summarizing persons-in-the-street interviews. But later on you may see them frustrated, looking for those ideas, those jottings, those notes in the vast, pointer less deserts known as hard disks. And what if they find them? You see them cutting and pasting, clipping here and there, and at the end of the day they might delude themselves into thinking that they will remember the location of the files, or, sadder still, they promise themselves that they will tidy their hard disks and impose order and logic to their folders and directories. Users of the NBW suite, by contrast, take their notes, and the Orbis module takes care of retrieving them. The NBW users are presented with their notes, they can read, and they can incorporate them -- in their entirety or in parts -- into the body of their documents or into their foot/endnotes. NBW users can do this on the fly with minimal interference to the flow of their writing.”
Dr. Mark D. Szuchman — Department of History, Florida International University
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Click here for more information about Orbis
Click here for information about what is new in NB14
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