We have presented the application of an enhanced visualization technique for self-organizing maps called Adaptive Coordinates to aid in the detection and understanding of the overall structure of text archives. Text documents are transformed into a vector space representation on which a SOM is trained using an enhanced learning rule to mirror the movements of the map's nodes in a 2-dimensional output space. The resulting visualization depicts the inherent structure in the high-dimensional input space in a very intuitive way derived from the self-organizing process of SOM training. Mapping a query onto the SOM directs the user to the relevant part of the map which may be used as the starting point for convenient interactive exploration.