1. A method for positioning one or more documents in a visual file space associated with a personal corpus, said method comprising the steps of: storing each of said documents with an indication of term weight for terms appearing in said corresponding document, wherein said term weight is based on a frequency of occurrence of said terms in a reference corpus; and performing a singular value decomposition based on said term weights to position a given document in said visual file space based on a relative frequency distribution of terms of said document compared to the occurrence of such terms in a reference corpus.