This session will introduce basic methods for reading and processing text files in Python. We will proceed slowly through an example that demonstrates reading in a large text corpus from structured or unstructured files, basic string processing, word frequency counting, and syntactic analysis. Attendees will learn to perform these tasks in base Python and using the natural language processing library spaCy. No prior knowledge of Python is assumed, but attendees may wish to follow an online guide to configure a python installation in order to follow along with the examples.