A method for interactive foraging for documents within a corpus of documents includes forming a working set of documents which are a subset of the corpus of documents. A visual representation of the working set and a portion of the corpus other than the working set are generated, and a visual representation of a retrieval boundary, between the working set and the portion of the corpus other than the working set, is presented. A further embodiment provides a system for interactive foraging of documents within a corpus of documents which includes, a visualization foraging subsystem, and an analytical repository containing a plurality of documents. The documents have been analyzed and are provided with associated dimensional data. A search mechanism of the visualization foraging subsystem is configured to form a working set of documents from the corpus of documents. A display device displays the working set and a portion of the corpus other than the working set, and a retrieval boundary is displayed on the display distinguishing between documents in the working set and the displayed documents of the corpus other than the working set.