WG 2, “Methods and tools” is the working group which will coordinate activities related to sharing, evaluating and improving methods and tools for Distant Reading research. Members of WG 2 will come from participants who, as “scholarly hackers,” are active in computational linguistics, text mining, computational stylistics, and digital literary studies. The combination of expertise from people in these fields guarantees that we will see fertile crossovers between different disciplinary traditions and coding schools. Firstly, we aim to stimulate the awareness among the Action members of the possibilities of the many frameworks and libraries which are already out there (such as the high-level library for R: ‘Stylometry with R’ or the lower-level library of Gensim), through the organization of hands-on training schools and through the development of dedicated online tutorials on specific topics. As such, education is a core concern of this WG. Secondly, we have the ambitious aim to unify existing language and text technologies in Digital Humanities (e.g. Named Entity Recognition) and bring them together as much as possible into a single platform/library, that allows users to seamlessly switch between different languages or corpora. This is challenging because of the diversity of languages and periods covered. Thirdly, we aim to raise awareness about the strengths and weaknesses of established modelling approaches in the field, for instance for topic modelling and text classification, including the standards and metrics that are necessary for their empirical evaluation (e.g. through the use of a standard validation sets). Quantitative evaluation is an interesting topic in the Digital Humanities where much of the quality assessment happens through hermeneutic means.