About
Sylvia K. Miller is Senior Program Manager, Publishing Innovations, and Publications Manager for
Humanities Futures at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Sylvia served as Director of the Mellon-funded
Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project at UNC Chapel Hill for 5 years.
During her 25-year career in scholarly reference publishing (as Publishing Director of Reference at Routledge and Executive Editor at Scribner Reference) she commissioned and published scholarly content for a wide audience, including many encyclopedias in the humanities and social sciences that won
Library Journal Best Reference honors and the distinguished Dartmouth Medal. Involved in the transition to online publishing from its beginnings, she began to develop her skills in information architecture and online usability in the mid-1990s.
Today Sylvia’s work is dedicated to redefining scholarly publishing to respond to digital innovations and encompass multi-modal scholarship. In 2014 she founded the working group
Publishing Makerspace, which won a place at the Scholarly Communications Institute and continues to run workshops. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.A. from Columbia University, both in Comparative Literature.
Sylvia has an enduring love of poetry, music, and handcrafting books and art out of paper.
All her comments are her own and not intended to represent Duke University or the Franklin Humanities Institute.
Education
Sylvia received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and her M.A. from Columbia University, both in Comparative Literature. Projects
Sylvia currently manages an online collection of “think piece” essays called
Humanities Futures.
Publishing Makerspace is an inter-institutional working group that aims to redefine publishing to include all of the forms of work that scholars are creating today. The group runs workshops to encourage design thinking and collaboration called Publishing Makerspace Workshops.
As Director of the Mellon-funded
Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project at UNC Chapel Hill for 5 years, She experimented with new publishing formats and workflows in addition to digitizing an important archive of 4,000 oral histories; projects involved collecting multi-genre scholarship online, user commenting, publishing archival primary sources in book form, mapping oral histories, and publishing multimedia ebooks with outbound links to archives ( “portal books”).
Some of her favorite encyclopedia projects from her years in scholarly reference publishing are
The Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (10 vols., Oxford UP and Berg);
The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (10 vols., Garland/Routledge);
The Encyclopedia of Advertising (4 vols., Fitzroy Dearborn/Routledge);
Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (Routledge);
Violence in America: An Encyclopedia (4 volumes, Scribners);
Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (4 vols., Scribners).
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
January 2018 – Participated in two-day letterpress printing workshop at Asheville BookWorks in Asheville, NC
December 2017 – Participated in workshop at the Center for Book Arts in NYC on zine-making and letterpress printing
November 2017 – Emory University, talk on “Creative Collaboration in the Humanities” and Publishing Makerspace workshop
October 2017 – “Monograph Publishing at the Crossroads: The Humanities Center as Publishing Makerspace and the Monograph 2.0,” talk at Book History + Digital Humanities Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison Memberships
American Library Association
