Writing as a Self-Organized Critical Process

Nikolay Mikhaylovskiy

We explain autocorrelation decay power laws omnipresent in texts by self-organized criticality. Specifically, we analyze the recently released KLiCKe keystroke dataset and show that not only the final texts' autocorrelations form a manifold that adheres to a power law with a finite-size scaling, but also the text revisions generate revision-size-dependent restoring dynamics toward that manifold. Thus, human writing appears to dynamically regulate semantic correlations in a text toward a critical state.