BW #60: Iceland

I returned late Sunday night from a trip to Iceland, where we (my wife, one daughter, and I) drove around the island via the famous ring road. Iceland is a truly amazing place, full of endless mountains, waterfalls, and natural wonders. We hiked on a glacier, explored an ice cave, and enjoyed soaking in naturally heated mineral baths while snow was falling. Oh, and we saw the northern lights on several occasions, including on our drive back to the airport — at the same time as we could see a volcano erupting just to our south.

Any photographs you've seen of Iceland don't even come close to doing it justice. The overwhelming size and number of natural wonders awe inspiring.

The thing is, Iceland is a huge place, but its population is very small. We saw many more foreigners than locals; I'm not really sure how many native Icelanders we encountered during our trip. Even many of the local staff we encountered (e.g., at hotels) were immigrants or foreign workers.

I thought that it would be fun to spend this week looking at some information about Iceland, to share at least a bit of what I enjoyed on my trip there. (And my apologies for the late publication of this week's questions, but I returned to a packed week of corporate training and writing proposals for new clients.)

Data and six questions

This week, we'll be looking at a number of different data sets, all having to do with Iceland. The learning goals for this week include joining, cleaning data, pivot tables, regular expressions, and plotting. I’ll be back tomorrow with full solutions, including the Jupyter notebook I used to solve these problems.

• Create a data frame from Wikipedia's page listing the size of each country and territory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_area). Now create a second data frame from Wikipedia's page listing the population of each country and territory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations) ). Where does Iceland rank in terms of size? In terms of population? In terms of people per square kilometer of land?
• Next, we'll look at tourism to Iceland. Go to the OECD's data portal (https://stats.oecd.org/?lang=en). Even though it claims that this page is no longer relevant, that's not true! Search for "inbound tourism" in the widget on the left side, and download the CSV file with info about inbound tourism for the entire OECD. Create a data frame from that data in which the year is the index, and the value (i.e., number of tourists) is a column. You'll want only those rows where the variable is INB_ARRIVALS_TOTAL.