Volunteer Knowledge Curators — Rock & Art | Remote, Worldwide

Company Description

About Rock & Art

Rock & Art is an independent cultural journalism and knowledge platform exploring art, music, literature, identity, bodies, sexuality, politics and subcultures through critical, intersectional perspectives.

We are not a conventional news outlet or magazine. We practice slow journalism: research-driven, long-form and contextual work that seeks to understand culture rather than simply report on it.

Rock & Art is built around the belief that journalism can be a method of producing public knowledge. Our work connects cultural criticism, research, documentation and collective knowledge-building, creating an independent and lasting resource for readers, researchers and communities.

Our editorial practice is guided by intellectual curiosity, evidence, context, editorial independence, and a commitment to complexity and responsible representation.

We are currently building an international volunteer community of writers, researchers, editors, fact-checkers, knowledge curators and cultural contributors who want to help develop Rock & Art as a long-term cultural knowledge project.

This is a fully remote, worldwide volunteer opportunity. You can apply from anywhere in the world, provided you can collaborate remotely and communicate effectively with the team.

All positions are voluntary and unpaid. They are not employment positions and do not include salary, fees or financial compensation.

Job Description

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.

Additional Information

What you can expect from Rock & Art

Although this is an unpaid volunteer position, we want the work to be meaningful and properly structured.

You can expect:

• a defined knowledge-curation framework;
• access to Rock & Art’s taxonomy and knowledge architecture;
• opportunities to work with interdisciplinary cultural material;
• collaboration with researchers, writers and editors;
• experience contributing to a developing knowledge graph;
• opportunities to develop skills in knowledge organisation and information architecture;
• recognition of substantial contributions where appropriate;
• the opportunity to help build a long-term cultural knowledge resource.

Your work may influence how future Rock & Art content is researched, written, connected and discovered.

Time commitment

This is a flexible volunteer role.

You may contribute occasionally, work on a defined knowledge project, or participate on an ongoing basis.

Some assignments may involve reviewing a small collection of articles. Others may involve developing a taxonomy, mapping a subject area or contributing to a larger knowledge-architecture project.

The scope and timeframe will be agreed in advance.

We value thoughtful and consistent participation over volume.

Important information about this opportunity

Location: Remote — worldwide
Position type: Volunteer
Compensation: Unpaid / no financial compensation
Employment status: This is not an employment position
Commitment: Flexible, agreed according to availability
Language: English
Experience: Open to emerging and experienced knowledge workers, researchers and cultural practitioners

How to apply

Please submit:

1. A short introduction explaining who you are and why knowledge curation interests you.
2. Your CV or a brief overview of your relevant background.
3. One example of work involving research, information organisation, classification, documentation, archival work, databases, editing or knowledge management, if available.
4. A short response to this question:

Choose a cultural subject you know well. How would you organise its key people, concepts, movements, works and historical contexts so that someone unfamiliar with the subject could begin to understand the relationships between them?

There is no single correct answer. We are interested in how you think.

We are looking for people who see knowledge not as a pile of information, but as a living structure of relationships—and who want to help us build that structure.