Textual analysis with IRaMuTeQ of recent research in the History of mathematics education in Brazil: an example of Digital Humanities

In this paper, we aim to analyze the knowledge production in the History of mathematics education (HEM), through the lens of Digital Humanities and taking into consideration master and doctoral thesis presented in 2012 and 2017 in Brazil. Our sample is composed of 52 documents. A multidimensional analysis was carried out on abstracts, using IRaMuTeQ software. Topics and methodologies were determined by word count frequency in the sample; while the correspondence factorial analysis was used 1) for semantic contextualization purpose, and 2) to visualize distances between textual corpuses (thesis and dissertation abstracts). In Brazil, HEM evolution shows an increase in the number of documents, topics and employed methodologies. Teacher curriculum was the hot topic and depth hermeneutics its main theory and methodological framework in 2017. Our findings illustrated the influence of research groups in the research agendas of universities. In addition, the results confirm that Digital humanities tools and more precise text mining tools, are useful to analize evolution of knowledge production in HEM