Visualizing Texts

There are a bunch of online tools for creating "word maps" out of websites or your own text. The resulting maps are great for classroom teaching, to give students a sense of the most common words/phrases in a text. Of course, they don't work so well when you're looking for themes (ideas expressed in different or multiple ways by different individuals but involving the same concept). For that, I still resort to an old-fashioned spreadsheet where I tally the frequency of occurrence of particular themes in a text. But once you have that tally, you can still create a cool-looking word map using one of these online tools.

http://www.tagxedo.com/
http://tagcrowd.com/
http://www.wordsift.com/
http://www.wordle.net/
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/

For a good discussion of the pros and cons of these different applications, check out this webpage:
http://sta.wp.trincoll.edu/?s=wordle&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=Search