Abstract. Heritage visualisation has been one of the pioneers in acknowledging the imperative of paradata i.e. that of documenting not only the outputs of
knowledge making but also the practices and processes, including decisions and
intellectual work underpinning of how they came into being. However, even if the
need and technical means to represent such information exist, the practical understanding of how to capture such information remain underdeveloped. The aim of
this chapter is to delve into the imperative of paradata as a theoretical and practical
challenge and to outline how to get grips with it: what is possible and how, and
what is probably unachievable and why. A model of a process for identifying and
acquiring usable paradata is outlined and major pitfalls of paradata generation,
relating to non-actionable standards and exceeding data cleaning are discussed.