Conducting research — and getting it published — is not for
the faint-hearted.
Authors and publishers demand attention to detail throughout a project’s many interconnected parts.
Wouldn’t it be something if software would address this complex conjunction of needs though a single application, a single interface, and with all needed components coordinating in the same project?
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NOTA BENE.
The Nota Bene Workstation is the multi-component integrated solution that unifies every scholarly task through a common interface in a single program.
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NOTA BENE
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CORE OF WORKSTATION
Note Bene’s word-processing component does fancy things no other program does — it offers three independent series of footnotes (so you can create a critical edition of a medieval manuscript), more cross-referencing options than you can imagine, and professional back-of-manuscript indexing. When you add built-in academic styles, frameworks/outlines, academic research tables, and more, you understand that you now have capabilities not available anywhere else.
But it is in simplyfing complex formatting tasks that Nota Bene excels. For example, use the keyboard shortcut, or click the icon, to create a block-indented quote, and all the multiple components involved in the required layout are taken care of — inter-paragraph spacing above and below the quote, margins, and internal line-spacing, even whether or not the paragraph subsequent to the quote should be indented or not — so you can simply continue writing. We understand completely that your time should be spent in creating documents, not in formatting them.
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LINGUA
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ADD-ON MODULE
With the Lingua add-on module, you can access a full range of IPA characters, and work in the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Cyrillic alphabets, in all Nota Bene modules — you can add a bibliographic entry in Greek, or search for Arabic words in Orbis.
Classicists and biblical scholars can add Coptic, Syria, Ugaritic, and Akkadian.
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IBIDEM
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INCLUDED IN WORKSTATION
Ibidem is Nota Bene's powerful bibliographic database and citation system. Enter a record once (or let Archiva harvest records for you), and it will be accessible your entire career. You can search (on 32 fields at once!), sort, and produce reports using all of the word processor's power (including outputting to tables).
Ibidem excels in citing references and building end-of-document bibliographies in real time as you add, move, or delete citations, whether full form, shortened subsequent forms, using ibid., or more. Ibidem generates them automatically on the fly. Do you need to submit the paper to another journal that uses a different style? Simply select the style (from among hundreds), and with a few clicks your entire document's citation apparatus will be reformatted. (For example, citation-only notes will convert to and from in-text citations.)
And now Ibidem comes in two ways — a full version that makes everything immediately accessible (top image), and a "pop-up" mode that offers Ibidem's essential elements in a compact, floating pane (bottom image) that is perfect not only for users who operate on more restricted screen sizes, but for anyone who wants an unimpeded view of both the document and the citation/reference apparatus.
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To add extraordinary power to common research activities, Ibidem records support links of all kinds — to on-line sources (web pages, including PDFs), local copies of those, images, and note-taking files. Note-taking files are full Nota Bene documents in which you take notes, save quotations, and engage in arguments relevant to the source text. Best of all, every note-taking file can become part of Orbis's universe.
IBIDPLUS
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INCLUDED IN WORKSTATION
IbidPlus (included as part of the Nota Bene Workstation) lets you use Ibidem's database engine to keep track of non-bibliographic records — field notes, record collections, addresses of friends, and much more
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ORBIS
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INCLUDED IN WORKSTATION
Orbis is unequalled in its abilities to search and retrieve all content. Its no-effort, no-tag, form-free coding/ annotating speeds up search and retrieval of discriminate portions of documents. And once it's identified those elusive passages, it shows them to you in a simple-to-read keyword-in-context table view, with the selected match (which can be expanded in context, all the way up to the entire file) shown below, ready for single-key insertion into your open document. (If that fragment is from a note-taking file linked to an Ibidem record, that source will be automatically brought with it, making sure that everything is properly attributed!)
Whether searching for words or phrases, alone or in Boolean combinations (where the results are shown in a useful tree-structured diagram), and whether using the precise terms or expanding the search with synonyms, Orbis can find what matters for you. Instantly.
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YOUR EXPANDING DIGITAL HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE
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Everything you write in Nota Bene can
become part of this expanding circle — seeing how words are used, and arguments made, across thousands of documents, you then see things in a different light, and your reshaped argument/text itself becomes part of this — your — expanding knowledge base.
ORBIS+
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ADD-ON MODULE
With the Orbis+ add-on module, all PDF files, saved (HTML) web pages, and Word (DOCX/DOC/RTF) and other DOCX files on your computer, even further extending the circle. With Orbis+, there's hardly a useful bit of text on your computer that you can't search and retrieve effortlessly.
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ARCHIVA
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INCLUDED IN WORKSTATION
The Nota Bene Workstation now includes components of Archiva that assist you in building your Ibidem library by including both works found in an Archiva search of on-line libraries (over 500 are included) as well as citations captured from web pages such as JSTOR, Project Muse, EBSCO, and selected other aggregators
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Note: the first few options shown in the Archiva dialog are included in the Nota Bene Workstation; the others shown are features of Archiva+
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ARCHIVA+
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ADD-ON MODULE
Archiva+, a new add-on module, extends the built-in Archiva's record-creating functions to include conversion of digital versions of formatted bibliographies (in five major styles) into structured Ibidem records, as well as the ability to build bibliographic records from ISBN numbers, both from well-structured lists, or by extracting them from within free-form text files
The ability to mine free-form text files in virtually any format for ISBN numbers
lets you use virtually any (there are many free apps) smart phone ISBN bar-code scanner
(that can send the results in a file to your computer) to add works to your library!
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Taken together, these tools can fundamentally reshape your work — simplifying the tedious, and opening up creative possibilities.
AUTOMATION — SPEED and CONSISTENCY
Select the needed academic style at the time of creating a document. And with that, every element of that style is now embedded. No messing around in mid-document with settings to suit needed changes in layouts: every type of paragraph is automatically formatted, with line-spacing, indentation, margins, heading size and location, block quotes, all handled automatically.
References are formatted instantaneously as they are cited; pasted citations are automatically re-formatted; bibliographies are auto-generated in real time. Non-standard sources (e.g., unpublished archival manuscripts) are cited according to one-time entry of user’s specialized requirements.
And if a different academic style is needed, one click will re-format every element of the document to conform to the newly selected style. Automation throughout: from Front Matter to Back Matter.
CONFIDENCE IN EVERY MOVE
We recognize that our job begins from the moment you start Nota Bene. We know that your job is to research, create, write, and that ours is to facilitate, to automate. Thus Nota Bene incorporates facilitators to nurture your user confidence, providing brief pop-up tips, as needed, in real-time to explain the program’s action and guide your selection every step of the way. As you become familiar with the interface, these Info Tips can be turned off individually or comprehensively.
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