On Deformations of Pasting Diagrams

Abstract

We adapt the work of Power to describe general, not-necessarily composable, not-necessarily commutative 2-categorical pasting diagrams and their composable and commutative parts. We provide a deformation theory for pasting diagrams valued in $k$-linear categories, paralleling that provided for diagrams of algebras by Gerstenhaber and Schack, proving the standard results. Along the way, the construction gives rise to a bicategorical analog of the homotopy G-algebras of Gerstenhaber and Voronov.