  Ancient Chinese texts present an area of enormous challenge and opportunity
for humanities scholars interested in exploiting computational methods to
assist in the development of new insights and interpretations of culturally
significant materials. In this paper we describe a collaborative effort between
Indiana University and Xi'an Jiaotong University to support exploration and
interpretation of a digital corpus of over 18,000 ancient Chinese documents,
which we refer to as the "Handian" ancient classics corpus (H\`an di\u{a}n
g\u{u} j\'i, i.e, the "Han canon" or "Chinese classics"). It contains classics
of ancient Chinese philosophy, documents of historical and biographical
significance, and literary works. We begin by describing the Digital Humanities
context of this joint project, and the advances in humanities computing that
made this project feasible. We describe the corpus and introduce our
application of probabilistic topic modeling to this corpus, with attention to
the particular challenges posed by modeling ancient Chinese documents. We give
a specific example of how the software we have developed can be used to aid
discovery and interpretation of themes in the corpus. We outline more advanced
forms of computer-aided interpretation that are also made possible by the
programming interface provided by our system, and the general implications of
these methods for understanding the nature of meaning in these texts.
