representeringarrepresentation

Representeringarrepresentation is a coined term used in analyses of how representations are formed and used to stand in for things and ideas across disciplines. The word blends representering, the act of representing in several Scandinavian languages, with the English noun representation, signaling a focus on both the process and its outcomes. The term is often employed to discuss how complex ideas are encoded and communicated through multiple layers of representation.

In its core, representeringarrepresentation refers to the study and practice of creating, analyzing, and comparing representations of entities, processes, or concepts, and, in some uses, to the meta-level notion of representations that themselves encode other representations. It covers symbolic, geometric, probabilistic, and data-structural forms, and asks how these artifacts relate to what they stand for.

Contexts include philosophy of mind and cognitive science, where researchers examine mental representations and their content; linguistics and semiotics, which study signs and symbol systems; computer science and AI, where data formats, encoding schemes, and model representations organize information; and media studies, which assess how groups and events are portrayed through layered representations.

Examples range from neural networks whose internal activations encode features, to knowledge graphs that model relations between entities, to films that narrate history through perspectives represented in multiple viewpoints. In each case, representeringarrepresentation concerns how faithfully and efficiently a representation captures relevant aspects of reality.

Key concerns include bias, interpretability, and epistemic risk: representations may distort or simplify, while meta-representations raise questions about ontology and authority. The concept invites comparisons across disciplines and encourages explicit discussion of what is being represented and how.

Related topics include representation, meta-representation, semiotics, and information representation.