This visualization uses the NYTimes api to gather mentions of various wars over the years and prints each total for every month between January 1981 and March of 2009 (approximately when the project was due). The Processing program makes a series of calls to the api and prints the number of mentions in the form of a bar chart in a super large print file. The labels of each bar were automatically added in Processing but I added the legend and title of the poster myself.

Of interest is how many times WWII is mentioned consistently over everything else and indeed if another war starts, mentions of WWII increase. The spike around 10/95 is the 50 year anniversary of WWII. And the slight rise of the mention of Afghanistan in the 80s is actually mentioning the Soviet-Afghan War and not the U.S.'s post 9/11 war.

This is probably the simplest visualization I've done and yet because it's easy to understand I think it is one of the more effective ones. If timing and interest permit, I'd like to make charts for other kinds of mentions. Not so much because the work itself is unique (far from it) but because the results are lovely and would make good nerd wall art.

I've uploaded a larger version of the file in case the zoomify version isn't working below or you'd just rather see it all together.

Above you can see a Zoomify version of the poster which should, in theory, allow you to zoom in and pan around the print-quality poster. (If you pan by clicking and holding the mouse, however, you need to keep the mouse in position over the poster, else it gets a little funky.) Also, sometimes the swf doesn't load when the page loads so if all you see above is the "Zoomify" logo, please give it a little reload. Thanks!