A few brief thoughts on maps, models, canvases (for Christina Wodtke who asked about this on Twitter).
Let me start by saying that definitions should always be provisional and based on context. My first answer to Christina was that this sounds like a rabbit hole. It’s all too easy to get mired and tangled up in defining things and definitions easily drift toward dogma. But she persisted so here are a few thoughts.
A model is a facsimile or simulacrum for reality that is held in the mind but that can also be visualized, externalized, and brought into reality in some way, for the purpose of playing with it or thinking about it. For example when you put together a plastic model of a car you are not making a real car, but a model — a facsimile that in some ways resembles the real thing but in a way that makes it easier to think about it and explore possibilities. A model usually, and I think maybe necessarily, is a simplification or abstraction of the reality as a way to explore its workings. A paper airplane is a kind of a model.
When you make a diagram of a model for yourself or for others you could call that a map.
