Volunteer Knowledge Curators — Rock & Art | Remote, Worldwide

At Rock & Art, publication is not the end of the process.

An article can become a point of connection to other articles, people, movements, concepts, historical periods, cultural practices, works of art, organisations and sources.

Knowledge curation helps make those relationships visible.

You will help us think beyond individual pieces of content and consider the larger intellectual structure they belong to.

This role may be particularly suited to people interested in information architecture, humanities, cultural research, librarianship, archives, knowledge management, taxonomy, metadata, digital humanities or interdisciplinary research.

What you will do

Depending on your interests and experience, you may:

• Review published and developing Rock & Art content.
• Identify recurring concepts, themes, people, movements, works and cultural practices.
• Identify relationships between articles and research projects.
• Help organise content into meaningful editorial clusters.
• Develop and refine taxonomies and controlled vocabularies.
• Review categories, subcategories, tags and other metadata.
• Identify opportunities for internal knowledge connections.
• Help establish consistent naming conventions for concepts and entities.
• Create and maintain knowledge records.
• Identify gaps in the existing knowledge structure.
• Recommend areas requiring further research or future editorial development.
• Connect historical and contemporary material where meaningful.
• Help distinguish related concepts that should not be collapsed into a single category.
• Contribute to the development of the Rock & Art Knowledge Graph.
• Document editorial and knowledge decisions.
• Follow relevant Rock & Art Editorial System (RAES) standards and frameworks.

You will not be expected to know our existing knowledge architecture or RAES before applying. We will introduce you to the relevant systems and workflows.

What is knowledge curation?

Knowledge curation is not simply organising information.

It involves making thoughtful decisions about how information relates to other information.

For example, an article about a musical movement may connect to particular artists, political events, technologies, geographical contexts, genres, subcultures and historical developments.

Those relationships can help readers discover connections they would not otherwise encounter.

A knowledge curator asks:

What belongs together?

What should remain distinct?

What is missing?

What relationship exists between these things?

What terminology should we use?

What will make this knowledge useful five or ten years from now?

This requires both organisation and interpretation.

What we are looking for

We welcome applicants from a wide range of backgrounds.

You may be:

• a librarian or information professional;
• an archivist;
• a historian;
• a researcher;
• a humanities or social sciences student;
• a digital humanities practitioner;
• a knowledge manager;
• an information architect;
• an academic;
• a cultural researcher;
• a writer or editor with strong organisational skills;
• an independent researcher with experience building collections or databases.

Formal qualifications are not required.

We are particularly interested in people who enjoy finding patterns, making connections and bringing structure to complex bodies of information.

Strong candidates will generally demonstrate:

• analytical thinking;
• strong research skills;
• excellent attention to detail;
• curiosity about cultural and historical relationships;
• an ability to organise complex information;
• good written English;
• sensitivity to terminology and meaning;
• comfort working across disciplines;
• willingness to document decisions;
• intellectual humility;
• an understanding that classification is never completely neutral.

Experience with taxonomies, metadata, ontologies, knowledge graphs, library classification, archival systems, databases or information architecture is welcome but not essential.

Our approach to knowledge

Rock & Art does not treat knowledge as a collection of isolated articles.

We are building a connected repository in which individual pieces contribute to a larger understanding of culture.

We believe:

Knowledge is collective.

Structure creates meaning.

Context changes interpretation.

Classification carries assumptions.

Connections create discovery.

Good information architecture should help readers think, not simply help them navigate.

We therefore want our knowledge structures to remain flexible, transparent and open to revision.

A taxonomy is not a permanent statement about the world. It is a tool for helping people understand relationships within a body of knowledge.