7. A method according to claim 1 , further comprising: calculating a metric for degree of relatedness between two words in said textual data set; receiving a user selection of a word; displaying said selected word in a color that contrasts with the default display color; and displaying all other words in the textual data set with coloration indicating the degree of relatedness between that each word and the selected word.
1. A method performed by at least one electronic device having a processor and a memory for exploring an n-dimensional textual data set using word cloud representations of two-dimensional projections of the data set, comprising: providing a display space with a two dimensional coordinate system; generating a textual data set whose members comprise a set of words, each of which is associated with an n-dimensional vector populated by n numerical values, said vectors defining an n-dimensional data space; storing said textual data set in said memory so as to preserve each word's relationship with its associated vector; calculating a size attribute for each word in said textual data set; creating an initial two-dimensional subspace of the n-dimensional data space and storing said subspace in said memory; calculating the projection of each said n-dimensional vector onto said subspace, and saving said projection to memory; displaying a word cloud by performing steps comprising: placing each word from the textual data set in said display space at coordinates determined by its projection on said subspace; and displaying said word with a font size corresponding to its size attribute; receiving a user's selection of a word displayed in the word cloud via said electronic device's manual data entry means; receiving a user's motion input via said electronic device's manual data entry means; shifting said word cloud by performing steps comprising: selecting a frame rate for animating the movement corresponding to said user's motion input; for each frame, calculating the change in position in the display space corresponding to the portion of said user's motion input that occurred during said frame; replacing said two-dimensional subspace with another two-dimensional subspace in which the projection of the selected word's associated vector causes the selected word to be displayed at the new location dictated by said change in position; projecting each vector on the new subspace and saving each said projection to said memory; placing each word at coordinates in said display space corresponding to its vector's new projection; and repeating for each frame until detecting cessation of motion; upon cessation of motion, repeating the steps comprising displaying a word cloud using each word's associated vector's most recent projection on the most recent subspace.