In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the amount of text publicly accessible in digital form. The primary cause for this is widespread access to the Internet, the popularity of e-mail and social networking websites and collaborative efforts to preserve and share knowledge. These developments have inspired the creation of a wide variety of information visualization techniques that focus on large-scale text data and facilitate its exploration and analysis. One popular approach represents individual documents as glyphs on a 2D surface, with pairwise distances corresponding to semantic similarities. The metaphor of a moveable lens that summarizes the contents of texts underneath it has been proposed as a method of interaction targeted at free exploration tasks. The main goal of this master’s thesis project is to extend the basic technique by adding labels to the visualization that guide its users towards regions of interest more quickly without negatively impacting the lens’ usefulness. Also, an automatic framework that determines the tool’s effectiveness under different parameter settings is developed. Finally, the proposed improvements and the overall technique are evaluated by means of a think-aloud user study.