This week, we officially transitioned to Project 2 using the ACLED U.S. political violence dataset. I began by loading the dataset and exploring the basic structure—this included thousands of entries covering protest events, civilian-targeted violence, and battles across different U.S. states. One of the first issues I noticed was inconsistent naming in event types and missing location fields. I standardized event-type labels and filtered out rows lacking critical spatial data. After that, I created a checklist of features that might influence regional political unrest, such as year, latitude/longitude, and number of fatalities. This setup prepared me for spatial analysis in the coming weeks.