The {\it linear representation} of a subset of a finite projective space is an incidence system of affine points and lines determined by the subset. In this paper we use character theory to show that the rank of the incidence matrix has a direct geometric interpretation in terms of certain hyperplanes. We consider the LDPC codes defined by taking the incidence matrix and its transpose as parity-check matrices, and in the former case prove a conjecture of Vandendriessche that the code is generated by words of minimum weight called plane words. In the latter case we compute the minimum weight in several cases and provide explicit constructions of minimum weight codewords.