While Nota Bene has always offered unique capabilities for academic writing and citing, what distinguishes Nota Bene from all other writing and research tools is Orbis. The wonder of Orbis is to provide data access instantly, so you can:
- Find text strings, virtually instantly, in millions of files, as written, without needing to add keywords
- Explore the ways words are used and arguments made, presented in a keyword-in-context concordance-style summary view along with the full text
- Discover new and previously unseen relationships to help shape your understanding of the data and advance your writing in directions you never imagined
From the beginning, Orbis has been the heart of Nota Bene — it was the dream of finding lost texts and suggesting new insights by bringing these texts together that led Steven Siebert, Nota Bene's lead designer, to take a leave of absence from his Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy to design Nota Bene. It's been very gratifying over the years to hear NB users tell us that Orbis completely changed the way they worked. You can get some sense of that from http://www.notabene.com/brochures/orbis_quotes.html and the three quotes below. This radically enhanced version built into version 14 will open up myriad new research avenues for all of you in the Nota Bene user community.
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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 Eugen Fink in 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 — late Professor of Philosophy, University of Kentucky |
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Or, in the words of another user:
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You have my undying thanks for developing Orbis. Among word processors, Nota Bene is king; but its crown jewel is Orbis.
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And this somewhat humorous account from a lawyer:
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I have a deposition Friday and the main use will be Orbis.
I have a phone log of the plaintiff that is 17,288 pages long.
The co-defendant counsel took 1.5 hours to copy the file for me.
It took Orbis 2 min to index the file.
The problem is that I cannot take my desktop to the deposition.
The co-defendant counsel is working off of my notes. They had 3 secretaries working on the file for 4 weeks and my notes are far better than theirs. (My co-defendant counsel is a firm of over 300 lawyers. I have never seen so many secretaries.)
I found items that they never found.
A few weeks later...
The depositions were canceled. Plaintiff inquired about the phone log. They canceled the deposition because they thought the log would be 50 pages or so. When they found out the log was 17,288 pages they canceled.
Have not heard a word since.
It will take them 2 to 3 months in my opinion to read the log.
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In Nota Bene 14, Orbis has been radically reworked. Now, qualitative data databases — “textbases” in Nota Bene parlance — are created and indexed virtually instantaneously, thanks to the application’s new multi-thread architecture. Users no longer need to wait for the indexing to be completed, making work-flow satisfyingly uninterrupted. Best of all, textbases are constructed and indexed automatically: no user input is needed, making textbase creation and management effortless. Previously unimaginable speed and ease means that all Nota Bene 14 users can avail themselves of immediately accessible research functions. Thus:
- A wide range of textbases (including document-specific ones) are created automatically — you do not need to do anything at all
- These automatic textbases take into account a wide variety of users' typical search needs/queries
- When creating your own customized textbases, a wizard-like process along with a “Favorites” bar guides you through a simpler process
- The creation of textbases is now breathtakingly faster
- Users should expect Orbis textbase creation to be at least 10 times faster
- In all of our tests, performance speed increases were significantly faster — 30 or more times — than previous versions of Orbis
Here are the results of some of the many tests we ran:
| # of Files | File Types | Size | NB 13 Index Time
Hour:Min:Sec | Now
Min:Sec | Faster |
@ 10,000 | Mixed | 500 MB | 1:02:07 | 2:09 | 30 times |
@ 50,000 | Mixed | 86 GB | 7:06:28 | 12:25 | 35 times |
18,419 | NB Only | | | 3:06 |
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- Beyond that, everything is now done entirely in the background, so you can continue working, citing, doing anything in Nota Bene, without interruption
- Orbis now takes full advantage of your computer's power — it is both “multi-thread” when creating/updating a single textbase and can support multiple textbases at the same time
- As a result, the textbase indexer is no longer a single pane on the bottom of the main Orbis dialog, but operates as separate processes, each with its own taskbar progress thermometer as it works in the background
- The results of a search are easier to view and analyze:
- You can now control the size of the text in the table/results view
- The icons identifying files containing matches now show the kind of file — an NB file, a PDF, a web page, a Word document, a note-taking file for an Ibidem record, or a regular text file, etc.
- Orbis extends access from archival texts to files actively being worked on, with search results updated in real time, as changes are saved
- Orbis is now even more tightly integrated into Nota Bene, with a new popup search dialog perfect for direct access while writing (see below for details)
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If for any reason an existing version of a textbase cannot be opened, Orbis can automatically re-create it — you no longer need to reselect the files for a new version
Orbis's new multi-threaded architecture means that all processes are now conducted entirely in the background, allowing users an uninterrupted experience in writing, citing, on-line researching, or doing anything in Nota Bene. Whenever you experience one of those moments of “flow state,” when ideas and connections are generated during periods of animated and energized focus, Nota Bene 14 and the new Orbis are at your service.
Note: the Orbis module built into the Nota Bene workstation lets you search all your Nota Bene and other text files. And with Orbis+ you can extend your reach to PDF, HTML (including Radius web capture downloads, as described below), DOCX, DOC, RTF and other formats.
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