The "Handian" corpus ( 汉典 or Hàn diăn, i.e, the "Han canon" or "Han classics") contains over 18,000 classics of ancient Chinese philosophy, as well as documents of historical and biographical significance, and literary works. The versions of the documents presented here are derived from www.zdic.net under their permissive Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication.

The curation of these models is a collaborative effort between Indiana University (IU) and Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) to support exploration and interpretation of Chinese humanities texts. To date, almost all DH work on textual corpora has been conducted in European languages, especially English, French, German, and Spanish. There has been relatively little humanities computing involving Chinese language texts, and even less attention has been paid to ancient Chinese, particularly for directly handling Chinese characters.

The Chinese language, and ancient Chinese in particular, relies heavily on context for the interpretation of individual characters and words (Rosemont 2016) and some researchers have argued that differences in Chinese morphology make some of the techniques that work well for DH work in Western languages less applicable to Chinese (Zhao, Qin, & Wan, 2011). Words in Chinese are highly polysemous, requiring considerable amounts of context for their proper interpretation. The study of ancient Chinese philosophy is especially challenging because this ambiguity and openness to multiple interpretation seems to be deliberately exploited by the ancient masters (Rosemont 2016).

Because topic models help to contextualize the terms and the documents in a corpus, we believe they may be more useful for exploring and interpreting the classical Chinese corpus than traditional keyword searches or other ways of finding semantic similarities. Whether your experience agrees with this or not, we welcome your feedback to [colinallen.xjtu@gmail.com] about the Topic Explorer approach.

# References
* Murdock, Jaimie, and Colin Allen, "Visualization Techniques for Topic Model Checking", in Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference (AAAI-15) (Austin, TX: AAAI Press, 2015) http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI15/paper/view/10007
* Rosemont Jr., Henry, "Translating and Interpreting Chinese Philosophy", in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N Zalta, Summer 2016 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/chinese-translate-interpret
* Zhao, Qi, Zengchang Qin, and Tao Wan, "Topic Modeling of Chinese Language Using Character-Word Relations", in Neural Information Processing: 18th International Conference, ICONIP 2011, Shanghai, China, November 13-17, 2011, Proceedings, Part III, ed. by Bao-Liang Lu, Liqing Zhang, and James Kwok (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011), pp. 139–47 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24965-5_16
