Visualization is often viewed as a way to unlock the secrets of numeric data. But what about political speeches, novels, and blogs? These texts hold at least as many surprises. On the Many Eyes site, a place for collective visualization, we have seen an increasing appetite for analyzing documents. We present a series of techniques for visualizing and analyzing unstructured text. We also discuss how a technique developed for visualizing the authoring patterns of Wikipedia articles has recently revealed the collective lives of a much broader class of documents.