issue_comments: 1312898318

I'm a cryptic crossword enthusiast and have spent a lot of time scraping and parsing cryptic crossword clues from various blogs, forums and publications. The result is over half a million clues from cryptic crosswords over the past twelve years, including the clue, answer, puzzle date, puzzle name and a link to the original source. This is all hosted using Datasette, which has been a delight to use: https://cryptics.georgeho.org/

This dataset is a significant work of crossword archivism and scholarship, as acquiring historical crosswords and structuring their contents require focused effort and tedious cleaning that few are willing to do for such trivial data - for example, according to this 2004 selection guide, the Library of Congress explicitly does not collect crossword puzzles. Anecdotally, I know that many constructors/setters of cryptic crosswords use this dataset as a resource, and some even simply call it "the database" - this is probably one of the most impactful data projects I've worked on!