Nota Bene and Me

I have used Nota Bene since the mid-1980s for the simple reason that it is the only program suited to the needs of serious scholarship. I have written or edited almost a dozen books, and a lot more articles, using its evolving capacities over the last thirty years. You can write an article or a book chapter using other programs, but the other programs go no further. The Nota Bene suite–Orbis, Ibidem, Archiva–fills the scholarly workspace, cumulatively over time, so that today’s project will be there to use and to build on for tomorrow’s project.
I used to take notes by hand, filling out 3 X 5 note cards with my core ideas, then another set of 3 X 5 cards for bibliographic entries. I would shuffle the first set about while writing on great sheets of yellow paper, cutting and pasting the paper, then shuffling the second set of cards. I kept the cards from various projects in various shoe boxes, and the yellow sheets in manila folders in heavy metal file cabinets, which, up until a certain time in my writing life, began to fill the room. Every time I moved, I hauled both around with me. Nota Bene is fitted to this basic mode of scholarly work, which has not changed, yet it is adapted to the electronic age. Now I take with me my external hard disk which holds the equivalent of all I have written since my first word processor, neatly organized by project, source, concept–a virtual library. You could save that information in other forms, but only Nota Bene with Orbis in my experience can make it into the shape and size of a scholar’s study over the lifetime of a scholarly career. How I envy those beginning their academic lives with the advantage of Nota Bene as a tool for writing, organizing, saving, and building upon their work.

At the beginning, I loved Nota Bene because it is a writerly writer’s program. This was a physical thing, as important as jogging or eating the right foods. I was living in California at the time, and felt that one of the ways to resist the overly pleasurable, eye-hand coordinated, world of emerging video games, was to type commands instead of pointing to them with a mouse. This may be completely personal and idiosyncratic, but I felt that too much clicking with little pictures interrupted the rhythm and the recording of thought, the syntax of what it feels like to write. Nota Bene managed then to harness the pace and feel of writing to the efficiencies of the computer. Even the accents, which I use constantly, are made with a single keystroke, where other programs take three. Nota Bene has managed to preserve the sacredness and the dignity of the writing process throughout the various iterations from the original written commands, to menu-driven Nota Bene, to the current Nota Bene 10, which not only makes writing efficient and serious, but makes Orbis even more of an essential work tool in the moving in and about the accumulation of notes and ideas.

Hegel, I think it was, said, “When the Greek Gods retired from the world, they became German Professors.” He had not seen Nota Bene, which can make you feel as if you had a myriad of research assistants ready to find that distant source and bring it instantly to the screen, to organize and keep the sources straight, to retrieve and integrate them when they are needed. Nota Bene is not just for writing: It is the very principle by which the scholarly life in the digital age might be lived. I do not use anywhere near the full capacity of Nota Bene, Ibidem, Orbis, or Archiva. But the potential of all four makes me feel as if there are no limits to what I might think, write, or do without encountering a limit in the tools of thinking, writing, or doing.

It is not only that Nota Bene is wildly better suited to writers than any other program. When I go to other programs, as I occasionally have to do, I feel that I am participating in a world of quick results, short reports, and short-term goals, an academic poaching in a world of unknown commerce. With Nota Bene, I feel I am among fellow teachers and scholars, who take reading, research, and writing seriously. I realize this may appear silly, but the feelings one has in writing are important too. This extends even to the area of support. Since Nota Bene was developed by scholars for scholars, support is, and has been over the years, personal, quick, and responsive to the questions and needs of academic writers no matter what the discipline or subfield.