After considering several topics, I became morbid (which is not unusual) and went for war. Essentially I was curious about war movies versus the wars the movies are about. Some of my sketches are below. Using IMDB and Wikipedia, I scraped data about movies in the "war" genre that had been rated by more than 1,000 users. I started with a circle graph but eventually ended up with a linear timeline representation.

The final visualization (first and second image and movie) takes scraped movie data from IMDB and compares it to a handful of American wars from the last century. The timeline at the bottom marks when the wars were and the arcs originating from each war's starting point end at the year movies were made about that war. The movies in question are listed when the year they were made is activated on mouseover. Clicking on the start year of each war brings up basic information about that war: actual images from the war and stats on how many died. The movies about that war are then listed and information about each movie can be found on mouseover.

The most interesting thing to note is just how many movies were made about WWII versus all other wars. Also, there are less movies about the Korean war than almost anything else. Some caveats... because the data is from IMDB, an American website, it is definitely skewed towards American films. Also there are many movies about wars that are not listed on the timeline (historical wars and wars in other countries). These movies are still listed but they are not currently activated on mouseover.