How Scholars are using Nota Bene
Scholars around the world have used Nota Bene
to produce countless dissertations, articles, and books.
Here are how some of them describe their experience.
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John Tyrrell
School of Music
Cardiff University
Wales and Nottingham, UK
7 August 2010
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Like all my books from the late 1980s, the biography was written in Nota Bene, taking full advantage of the integrated suite of database in Ibidem and searching facilities in Orbis. The 68 chapters of volume 1 and the 58 chapters of volume 2 were seamlessly glued together (thank you, Manuscript Files) and sent off, converted into RTF for the publisher. Despite their great length, the two books went through the press with few problems. I also took advantage of the new indexing facilities, much enhanced since my first efforts in the 1990s. With much hand-holding from Steve Siebert, I was able to construct multi-level indexes for both volumes, some 60 pages for each volume. But I think Steve was relieved when I and my publisher went off the idea of a cumulative index.
I am proud of what I have achieved, but looking back at all this, I can see that what I have done has come about almost entirely through the possibilities provided by Nota Bene.
More about Dr. Tyrrell’s use of Nota Bene
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Mark R. Cohen
Department of Near Eastern Studies
Princeton University
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My current work, to be published by Princeton University Press in 2005, is a pair of books on poverty and charity in the Jewish community of medieval Islamic Egypt based on over 860 documents in Hebrew and Judeao-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters) from the Cairo Geniza. Over a period of years, I transcribed most of the documents in NB Lingua and indexed them in Orbis. . . . Without the combination of NB Lingua and Orbis, the project would have been nearly if not completely impossible.
More about Dr. Cohen’s use of Nota Bene
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Christian Moevs
Department of Romance Languages
University of Notre Dame
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The book [Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, Oxford University Press, 2005] required an enormous bibliography, of some 1500 citations, which Nota Bene generated instantly and almost perfectly, out of the thousands of hidden references sprinkled through my text. Most recently I compiled the index, again using Nota Bene's indexing features; Oxford told me a professional indexer could not have done it better. I delivered everything to Oxford in Nota Bene, and they produced an elegant and virtually flawless book from it.
More about Dr. Moev’s use of Nota Bene
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Ronald Bruzina
Department of Philosophy
University of Kentucky
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Nota Bene is a word processor that has a text-base search program called Orbis. ... In my own case, this facility was indispensable for a particular research project that was the occasion for my trying out Nota Bene. ... I was studying a deposit of thousands of hand-written note pages from the 1930s written by the last research assistant of Edmund Husserl ... The notes were brilliant in their insight and creativeness, but were difficult to grasp in their exact import because they were so unique, so unlike anything else done in Husserlian phenomenology, and so unorganized. ... This is where Nota Bene came in. The computer did none of the thinking for me, but it did the finding; and that was an enormous economizing of time ... So if my experience in the the kind of economizing that saves otherwise laborious searching and opens up worlds you might otherwise miss suggests it might be worthwhile, take a look at Nota Bene.
More about Dr. Bruzina’s use of Nota Bene
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David E. Schulz
Technical editor (CH2M HILL) and freelance writer
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Orbis has been helpful to me in the dating various texts. For example, H. P. Lovecraft's letters to August Derleth at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin had been archived in such a way that letters without exact dates follow letters with dates (by year). Gradually I learned to use Orbis to search through text on various details so as to date letters with precision using Lovecraft's letters to other correspondents. Orbis also has been useful in preparing editions of the writings of Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, George Sterling, and Clark Ashton Smith that are far more accurate (and more quickly prepared) that would have been possible without it. For example, we used an enormous textbase of the writings of Ambrose Bierce to track down and identify numerous unsigned writings in various newspapers and to identify how he rewrote portions of his newspaper columns as "essays" in his Collected Works.
More about David Schultz’s use of Nota Bene
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James W. Muller
Department of Political Science
University of Alaska
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For fifteen years I have been at work on a new edition of Winston S. Churchill's book, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. ... The new edition has been prepared entirely in Nota Bene, whose flexibility and power were indispensable for handling such a large and complex project. For instance, Churchill had three different sorts of footnotes; I have added a fourth for my editorial additions. Nota Bene's use of plain ASCII characters and its attendant ability to edit text in codes view has been crucial to my work, as is its ease in allowing work in multiple windows. My publisher, St. Augustine's Press, which is using Nota Bene for typesetting, has appreciated its ability to incorporate tables and illustrations.
More about Dr. Muller’s use of Nota Bene
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