Nota Bene stands at the center of my life as a scholar.  Twain’s Brand: Humor in Contemporary American Culture, just released in November, 2012, is my fifth Nota Bene book. I became a Nota Bene user with version 1.0 late in 1985, while finishing my dissertation. I had read about it in an MLA newsletter after recovering from a serious illness that (along with several other impediments) had seriously delayed my work, and thought that computerizing might help me finish at last, but had no idea how to move in that direction.  In fact, I bought my first computer to meet the system requirements for NB, and I did finish in the next few months. In the process, I found a whole new love of writing, because I had always found myself tinkering with sentences until they said what I meant, and in the days before word-processing that process meant page after page of unreadable scrawls that I spent far too much time recopying and retyping, staying in place instead of moving my text forward. Nota Bene freed me to revise while I wrote and still see what I was thinking, and thus changed writing from a grind to a joy.

Almost from the start I found the textbase, now Orbis, immensely useful for organizing and retrieving archival information; it’s so easy to put notes from each library folder or item into a separate file whose name indicates the bibliographic details, then search for remembered (or forgotten) keywords and concepts. Soon after finishing my dissertation I used the textbase to collate details on the history of automated printing in the nineteenth century with the financial and technical records of the Paige Compositor, the typesetting machine credited (erroneously, I found) with bankrupting, Mark Twain. Other textbases followed. For Garrison Keillor: A Voice of America  (1991), for example, I indexed my transcriptions of radio skits, mock-advertisement, and monologues from A Prairie Home Companion  from the archives of Minnesota Public Radio. I often get ideas for interpretations of the evidence while taking notes from archival sources, and Orbis lets me retrieve those too, according to codes I devised for marking them.  

Certainly I could not have written  Defining  New Yorker Humor (2000), my history of the early  magazine, without Orbis to manage the huge volume of notes on editorial correspondence and reading that I collated with a customized Ibidem database I created of 15,000 cartoons, covers, illustrations, articles, poems, and stories (and my thoughts on them) from in the years before the magazine had either table of contents or an electronic edition.

Twain’s Brand relied more on Archiva and Ibidem than Orbis–I loved being able to attach web pages, PDFs, and reading notes to Ibidem bibliographic records–and I have since switched from PC to Mac, but being able to import and export files in other formats has meant that, even when collaborating on editorial projects, I have never been the least bit tempted to switch from Nota Bene to anything else.