Hi @poulalberg
That’s serialized PHP. Without knowing the history of the installation it’s hard to say for sure, but it’s possible this is the result of an upgrade that had problems, or some direct database editing. You’d be able to tell by looking in the author_settings table. Your specific example is related to the affiliation field. It’s fixable, probably with some scripting (make a backup of the database first).
Cheers,
Jason