I would:


Go thorough all values, grouping them by their Levenshtein distance from each other.
For all set of similar names, I would choose canonical one, and put them in taxonomy as a term. 
Using Computed Field or VBO I would choose the Levenshtein closest term for each node.


Details of implementation would need a bit of polishing, but that's my general approach. Apparently you can use Views Bulk Operations both to create taxonomy terms and to set field's value on node.

Best way to migrate text field to taxonomy reference field
A former coworker did something to top that whenever it runs as root the data is sorted by MEM usage instead of the default CPU usage. According to multiple searches, the man page and even the options within the top console itself (O), just pressing k it should be sorted by CPU, but instead when I hit k it asks me for a pid to kill.

So how can I get back default sorting to CPU?  
