A Superficial Working Guide to Deformations and Moduli

This is the first part of a guide to deformations and moduli, especially viewed from the perspective of algebraic surfaces (the simplest higher dimensional varieties). It contains also new results, regarding the question of local homeomorphism between Kuranishi and Teichmueller space, and a survey of new results with Ingrid Bauer, concerning the discrepancy between the deformation of the action of a group G on a minimal models S, respectively the deformation of the action of G on the canonical model X. Here Def(S) maps properly onto Def(X), but the same does not hold for pairs: Def(S,G) does not map properly onto Def(X,G). Indeed the connected components of Def(S), in the case of tertiary Burniat surfaces, only map to locally closed sets. The last section contains anew result on some surfaces whise Albanese map has generic degree equal to 2.