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We report on our work collaborating with two Bay-Area middle-school (grades 6, 7, and 8) districts to design, implement, and research the use of text visualizations in supporting English Language Arts and data literacy learning outcomes. Through co- design, classroom research, and participatory professional development with English Language Arts teachers, the project developed and tested text analytics tools, visualizations, and pedagogical routines. This article overviews the constraints we encountered, including technical constraints related to devices, access, and use, and pedagogical constraints including teacher and classroom time, and highlights a few strategies developed in response to those constraints. Drawing on classroom video, co- design sessions with teachers, and qualitative interviews, we find that “small” data visualizations that visualize text mining data created on single texts or small excerpts may support student data literacy and self-e!cacy as well as the development of a more expansive linguistic-experiential reservoir. We present a routine, “What did the computer miss?”, used by our collaborating teachers to support thinking with and about computing technologies that works especially well with single-/small- text data visualizations in the middle-school context, and conclude with suggestions and future directions for research and collaboration.