visualizing texts with wordle

Erin Templeton has a new post up at Profhacker on using wordle to introduce students in her literature classes to the concept of textual analysis. She mentions that she is frequently frustrated in trying to move students beyond description and summary on to analysis. It’s something we struggle with in history classrooms as well. Wordle takes a text and produces a frequency weighted word cloud of that text, with stop words removed. (Stop words are frequently recurring words with less semantic significance.)

Can you think of ways that a tool like wordle could be incorporated into your world history courses? Is it just gimmicky? What about the ngram viewer?