Abstract: Methods and devices for use in gathering and analyzing data from a corpus of documents. A corpus of documents is initially scanned for words that qualify as entities according to user defined criteria. Multiple counters track the number of documents which mention specific entities. A database of entities mentioned in the documents is maintained and an entry for each entity in the corpus is placed in the entity database. The results are then presented to a user in a spiral form with the most important entity at the center of the spiral. The importance of an entity may be determined by either how many entities it is connected to or how many documents mention that entity. A connection exists between two entities if they are both mentioned in at least one document and the more documents mention two specific entities at the same time, the stronger the connection between those two specific entities.