# Digital Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis of Arabic Textbooks
## 5 Case Study: Analysis of a Collection of Arabic Textbooks  
In this work, digital tools are intended to quickly and effectively help humanist researchers in the analysis of large corpora, enabling them to answer research questions and find patterns across large collections of texts by using powerful methods for qualitative and quantitative research. For instance, to analyse a large collection of Arabic textbooks (around 50 to 100 textbooks) for general education subjects at all school levels, issued over two academic years, the digital tools in the Edumeres Toolbox were used to carry out quantitative and qualitative textual analysis. The Edumeres Toolbox enabled researchers to create their own projects, insert/import/create metadata, analyse data from different perspectives, compare a group of documents or corpora across multiple criteria and variables (subjects, grades, years, regions, or versions), analyse and visualize extracted information or results in many data visualization types, such as frequency charts and word trees, and export results to Excel or HTML format. The success of a tool in supporting researchers depends predominantly on how easy the implemented tool is to use and whether it truly gives new access to the needed textual analysis. The Edumeres Toolbox can be used by any researcher to independently carry out different steps: the different assumptions that they may make, the different questions that they may ask, and the different patterns that they may find. All these steps affect the analysis process. Figure 3: Abstraction of a simplified flowchart and related process flow diagram (light grey) and main module (dark grey) of some use cases to generate reports in the Edumeres Toolbox. The steps involved in our analysis of a large collection of Arabic textbooks using the Edumeres Toolbox are presented in sequential order in the following pages, from data collection to analysis to interpretation of results. In the presented use case, we show how the research project on Arabic textbooks is developed using the Edumeres Toolbox. Hereby, the aim of the project was to examine content in textbooks that addressed the promotion of peace, and the peaceful coexistence of two or more groups regardless of their different beliefs, traditions, or cultural heritage, as well as elements addressing tolerance. As a first step, data were collected. Researchers could create projects/corpora/document collections by uploading/importing them from external resources. The upload file selector allows one or more files to be selected by using the Ctrl and Shift keys. Researchers can give their project a name and a description (see Figure 4 ) and control its visibility. Projects are private by default, but it is possible to share them and make them visible to other persons to allow collaborative activity. It is also possible to add categories to a project. The number of documents in each project may vary from very few to a great number of documents. Before importing the documents themselves, it is necessary to enter or import their metadata. The Edumeres Toolbox includes a component capable of importing metadata automatically from digitized external sources. Metadata include, for instance, the title of the textbook, authors, number of pages, edition, publisher, country, etc. A summary of the project, or any available shareable project, is displayed on the dashboard when the Edumeres Toolbox is started. The summary contains the name of the current project and its category, specifies how many documents the project includes, and indicates the type and geographical distribution of documents. Researchers can convert different types of documents into editable and searchable data by using the Tesseract optical character recognition (OCR) engine. This step is very important to obtain accurate results in frequency analysis reports. However, manual corrections are also generally required, especially when converting Arabic language documents as the linguistic characteristics of the Arabic text impose many challenges.