In the past, I’ve argued that, in the long run, the Chronicling America API might prove to be more valuable than the standard UI most people use to search the site. But I haven’t yet seen many really cool uses of the API. I wonder if a few cool demo hacks showing off the API might inspire people?

It seems to me that there is all kinds of untapped potential to numerous audiences. Yes, of course I can see text mining applications and such. But I could also see amateur historians using the API. (Imagine a website on, say, the history of baseball that taps into the API to present news articles on baseball players? Say local news coverage from every state of every World Series?) These are hometown newspapers — the potential is crazy.