Bob O’Hara was playing with TagCrowd, an online utility to produce tag clouds of any text.
Following his suggestion (and wasting a considerable amount of time), I fed all my PhD thesis chapters through the tag cloud generator.
But instead of just posting the complete list of tagclouds, I decided to make a cloud of clouds. So finally, I know what the essence of my thesis is.
(From FlickR)
The more I think about this, the cooler I think the idea is. I get a better and more immediate idea about your thesis than I would do from the titles of the chapters.