How to Document the Invisible Work Behind Digital Heritage Projects
A new paper tackles a persistent blind spot in cultural heritage digitization: organizations create detailed 3D models and databases but rarely document *how* they were made. Researchers outline a practical framework for capturing this 'paradata'—the decisions, methods, and reasoning that explain outputs—which matters because undocumented processes become irreproducible, unreliable, and harder to reuse or improve.
Originaltitel: Imperative of Paradata
<p>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.</p>