  Nonspherical perturbation theory has been necessary to understand the meaning
of radiation in spacetimes generated through fully nonlinear numerical
relativity. Recently, perturbation techniques have been found to be successful
for the time evolution of initial data found by nonlinear methods. Anticipating
that such an approach will prove useful in a variety of problems, we give here
both the practical steps, and a discussion of the underlying theory, for taking
numerically generated data on an initial hypersurface as initial value data and
extracting data that can be considered to be nonspherical perturbations.
