In this seminar, you will be focusing on taking notes on your readings and then enhancing those notes in the course of seminar discussions. Further, you will be using your Palm Pilot to enter notes from various other sources you will encounter in the seminar, and then transferring them to Nota Bene for search, retrieval and analysis.

An emphasis on note-taking skills would seem to be only too obvious: after all, it is the building block for all research activities in the academic, business, and government realms. But here we find a paradox: however essential taking notes is for research activities, we find that students too often don't take them or fail to fail to take them critically and fruitfully. Our emphasis on note-taking comes from several sources.

• First, it is the only mechanism that enhances and prolongs retention of materials — no amount of highlighting, bracketing, underlining or random jottings inserted on the pages of the reading assignments can compare in retention or cognitive processing.
• Second, it's a fact of academic life that students and scholars today often put down their jottings in computerized format, although the subsequent utility of such efforts is not always clear.
• Third, our emphasis in this course is to capitalize on your note-taking labor investment by ensuring that you are rewarded for such efforts over and over again in the course of your studies, your writing, and your future research activities. The mechanism used to ensure this “return on investment” is Nota Bene’s Orbis.

The traditional paradigm

Note-taking is as old as writing. When and if this skill is taught, it follows a very logical process that emphasizes a physically visual approach; that is, terms and concepts should appear on each card in such a way that the researcher can take advantage of physically organzing and re-organizing the data. The following steps, drawn from a page posted on a web site maintained by the Department of History at Bowdoin, are typical of the process.

Your research paper is based on your reading from different sources, so your notes must be sufficiently complete to be meaningful after the source has been read (or interviewed or heard or seen). Since you have to document (foot- or end-note) your paper, your notes must contain adequate resource information. Notecard method (using 3"x5" or 4"x6" index cards) is a convenient and flexible method of organizing your research. When you take notes, write only one note on each card. In addition to the note itself, write:

In the upper left hand corner of the card, the appropriate category or topic/subtopic to which the note refers.

In the upper right hand corner, the name of the source.

The page number(s) of that part (or those parts) of the source that you have used in taking the note. If you have used more than one page, indicate your page numbers in such a way as that when you start to write your paper, you can tell from what page each part of your note comes, for you may not choose to include the whole note.

This separate card method will make organizing your information much easier. When you come to outline and to organize your paper, you will be able to sort your notes in any way you please--by subtopic for example--and to arrange them in any order you please. You may even find that you want to recategorize some of your notes. Such flexibility is impossible if you take notes in a notebook. You will also be able to footnote your paper without having to refer to the sources themselves again [Patrick Rael, Department of History, Bowdoin College].

As you can see, the standard method relies entirely on the researcher's perceptive abilities as they are conditioned by the physical world: notes are "actual" or physical objects -- even if they are taken down using computers and produced by printers -- which are physically arranged in such a manner as to maximize their yield. Thus, the researcher's "return of investment" -- in the context of the labor expended -- depends largely on the efficacy of successfully locating on the computer or on printouts the specific contents of their notes.

The alternative paradigm

But suppose that the researcher can be freed from all physical constraints, that the order of note cards is no longer relevant to the yield of data or concepts, that no area within the note-taking document is more or less important than other regions, and that, finally, all efforts expended in writing down ideas and data are guaranteed to be found, unrestrained by the physical environment or physical ordering. In sum, imagine a mechanism that will find, order and present data and concepts in a virtual environment, a sort of search engine such as is used in the World Wide Web, only it's your own. This mechanism is Orbis.

Orbis is used by via Nota Bene (NB) to index all words in NB files. You then use Orbis to retrieve anything you’ve written — as much or as little as you need — for reviewing and incorporation into any new work you’re writing. To sum up from the Orbis help file:

Orbis is a free-form retrieval system accessible within Nota Bene. It gives you instant access to thousands of pages of existing text research notes, lectures, random jottings, lab reports, interview transcripts, field notes, lists, paragraphs from previous papers and chapters of books. Orbis makes everything you've ever written in Nota Bene or imported from an outside source accessible. Multiple documents can be searched simultaneously with the results displayed for easy reference or retrieved for use in a current document.

Orbis is the ideal tool for managing a career's worth of notes, papers and general information. There are no practical limits to the amount of information that can be handled: up to 1,000 files in each of 1,000 folders can be searched simultaneously. Use Orbis to find old notes, to make new connections and to come up with new ideas. Your old notes and papers can become a valuable and easily searchable source of information for your continuing writing and research.

Understanding the concept of a text-oriented database

In business-oriented database programs, the normal data structure involves separate fields, each field representing a specific type of data or variable, such as "item number" or "sale date" or "unit price" or "store location" and so on. The database program's responsibility is to relate the different fields to each other in ways that make sense and in order to respond to the user's queries. For example, a database could be queried as to how many units of products X and Y have been sold at which prices per sales region over the last two months? This is typically the usage given to desktop database programs such as Lotus Approach, Microsoft Access, or Corel Paradox.

Similarly, a statistics-oriented database program, such as SPSS or SAS, would focus on quantitative results that yield statistical relationships with appropriate levels of statistical significance or reliability. Family historians, for example, would typically use such database programs to analyze coded archival data dealing with household size, farm productivity, female fertility and age at marriage. The user could then query the program for the statistical relationships among data variables.

A text-oriented database program addresses similar needs as business and statistics database programs; that is, to respond to queries based on relationships, only the data are texts. Clearly, text-oriented database programs are used in qualitative research. A user's query of this type of database might look something like this: "What are the locational contexts in which dowries are provided in 18th- or 19th-century Mexico and Argentina?" Examples of qualitative database programs are AQUAD, WordStat, NUD*IST, INTEXT, and Nota Bene's Orbis. Orbis offers several advantages, especially its integration to the other applications in the Nota Bene suite, including Ibidem, the bibliography database program, and the word processing program.

Thus, Orbis can make sense of a vast landscape of words containing concepts, ideas, names, places ... anything written in NB, by providing order and uncovering relationships in computerized qualitative data.

How does it work?

Orbis is really a set of management files. These files are responsible for indexing and keeping tabs on the contents of documents saved in NB. Think of an Orbis textbase file as desk drawer to which you give an descriptive label. Inside this drawer is the mechanism that manages the apparently unwieldy mess of document files strewn about other drawers. Orbis provides you with several luxuries: the luxury of not having to know where those document files are located in your computer, the luxury of not having to know the names of the documents files, and the luxury of not having to remember the contents of each file. Simply present Orbis with your query and it will yield to you the relevant portions of the files' contents containg the information you seek. The effect is not very different from a search on the World Wide Web, only that you're dealing with your web of information.

The diagram below illustrates the indexing capacity of Orbis. The example represents an Orbis database file, named SOCIOLOG, which has indexed the contents of several document files. The document files can be located anywhere in the computer's hard disk.

Generally, I find it advisable to have a single database for a given large-scale activity, such as "Research" or "Correspondence" rather than having several databases, each dedicated to a specific (some would say, narrow) activity, such as a Familiy History Seminar or one's thesis. First, the management of multiple databases, each of which reflects a similar activity (e.g., research) can get confusing and can provide diminishing returns. Second, and more important, the body of information tends to overlap greatly, so why compartmentalize artificially? Are notes taken in a seminar on the family in Latin America likely to be so isolated from notes in a course on nation-building, or a project on comparative social movements? Information -- also known as data -- does not easily admit of such "stove pipe" thinking. By contrast, your correspondence with friends and family is not likely to overlap with your research notes and would deserve its own database.

Once you create a viable database, Orbis will answer your queries by a virtually instantaneous search and retrieval of relevant texts, drawn from your document files. The results can be visually represented by something like this:

Orbis searches for information by using boolean operators: and, or, xor, and not. Operators can -- and frequently will -- be combined with parentheses to make search conditions more refined and powerful. Remember that Orbis conducts all search operations from left to right, except in cases in which searches use the "not" operator or parentheses. Note in the examples below that Orbis searches are conducted without concern for case.

Thus, the following search:

debt and mexico or argentina not peru

would evaluate the query in the following order:

1. search for entries that do not contain "peru"
2. search for entries containing both "debt" and "mexico"
3. search for entries containing both "debt" and "argentina"

By contrast, in the query example below, Orbis would undertake the search based on a different order than simply from left to right.

debt and (mexico or argentina) not peru

would result in a

1. search for entries that contain "mexico" or "argentina"
2. search for entries that do not contain "peru"
3. search for entries that contain debt

There is no limit to the number of parenthetical expressions, as long as they are in balance (remember algebraic equations?).

Here are some examples of combination searches and their different results..

Once you complete your query, Orbis will first map the incidence of the resulting "hits" before going ahead with the actual search and retrieval.

By the way, notice that in the query example shown, the term "militar*" contains an asterisk at the end. This provides the query with a more powerful "reach" because Orbis will include terms such as "military" or "militarism." If the word had been clipped to "milit" and followed by an asterisk, Orbis would find, additionally, "militia," "militias," "militant," etc. These and other rhetorical tricks will come to you as you gain experience in building Orbis queries.

The results of the query illustrated here yielded 47 instances of "hits" that fulfilled the query's criteria. In the Results View, the user could select a portion of the found text -- either by using the mouse or the F2 key to define the selection -- which would be copied and pasted into a document in progress. If the entire find is desired, a simple click on the icon showing a pencil would copy all the content showing on the text window pane. Finds can be copied into any portion of a document, including the body proper, or footnotes, or annotations, etc.

The textbase in this example uses the paragraph as the linguistic unit of retrieval. You will notice that the paragraph in the text window contains six instances of blue text and that the number 6 appears below and to the right of the text, between two arrows. Orbis is reporting that six instances of the query's criteria were found. To the right of the arrows surrounding the number 6 is another pair of arrows. Clicking on the left one brings up the text above the find, which provides greater context for the find; clicking the arrow to the right will show text below the find. Additional clicks of the arrows would show additional text below or above. Any amount of text can be copied to the working document. Other features available in the Results View can be found in the Orbis Tutorial. One the most practical features is the capability of accumulating your finds into a discrete set in which you can set aside and come back to anytime without having to search again.

Some Practical Advice Prior to Plunging Ahead

The first bit of advice is clear, simple and direct: take the few minutes (20-30) needed to go through the excellent on-line tutorial that comes with the Orbis application. Click on the Orbis icon from the Nota Bene main window, then click on Help, Contents, Tutorial. You will not be sorry. In fact, by investing a brief time going through the tutorial, you will be amply rewarded because -- trust me -- you will have questions and you can have answers.

Second bit of advice. Before setting up your database, make the commitment to convert into NBW any notes you've taken in another program and give them each different names, of course, but make sure to give them all the same three-letter extension. Choose an extension that you will easily recognize as research notes: for example, "not" or "res" or any other three-letter extension that resonates with you as research files. Why this emphasis on the same extension?

Because among the many conveniences provided by Orbis is, first, its ability to index automatically all files with the same extension. Thus, there is no need to tag or mark individual files for indexing. And second, Orbis will keep tabs on all files and automatically update any changed or added files in its indexing mechanism. You therefore don't have to do any maintenance when you create a new research notes file or edit an existing one: Orbis will take care of such matters automatically every time you start the application (it will always have the courtesy to ask your permission first).

Make it your business to go through the tutorial, available in Orbis under Help, Contents. You will be amply rewarded.