Wherever there is text data, the need to parse, classify, and extract information may arise. There exist two easy-to-use and battle-tested tools for Pythonistas to tackle text processing: NLTK and spaCy. We’ll lead participants step by step through common NLP tasks using sample text data or their own text data. We argue that classification is at the heart of most useful applications of NLP and that recognizing this key insight is the foundation for pulling meaning out of a sea of characters.