The wonderful collaborative data visualization site Many Eyes has just introduced a new type of text visualization called a Phrase Net. It does a brilliant job of letting you explore a text and see which words are related to each other. The image below shows words related through simple juxtaposition. Words in darker blue more often appear at the beginning of a pair and those in lighter blue at the end. This image below clearly shows that 'strawberry fields' , 'good day', and 'blackbird singing' occur frequently in the dataset. The data here is a set of the lyrics from Beatles songs.
static image - embedded interactive version is below
You can change the type of patterns you see in the net with this interactive version.