Congratulations to Troy Griffitts!

Good news out of Birmingham today.

ITSEE extends its warmest congratulations to Troy Griffitts, one of its most longstanding doctoral students, on qualifying for the award of PhD.

Troy began his studies in Birmingham in September 2010, researching the development of collaborative online frameworks for volunteer contributions to scholarly datasets, with a particular focus on the New Testament. A year later, however, the opportunity arose for him to move to ITSEE’s collaborator, the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung in Münster, to become lead developer of the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room (NT.VMR). Troy continued to work on his doctorate as a part-time, split-site and latterly distance-learning student. His thesis describes the development of NTVMR 2.0, and the independent scholarly editing environment to which it has led, the freely-available Virtual Manuscript Room Collaborative Research Environment (VMR CRE).

Troy’s thesis, entitled Software for the Collaborative Editing of the Greek New Testament, was examined by Dr Dirk Jongkind of the University of Cambridge and Dr Andrew Davies, Director of the Edward Cadbury Centre at Birmingham. His supervisors were Dr Hugh Houghton and Professor David Parker. Following the successful completion of his doctorate, Troy continues to be active in supporting the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room, as well as the Museum of the Bible Greek Paul Project in the USA, the Coptic-Sahidic Old Testament Project in Göttingen and other teams using his software. He also remains a director of the CrossWire Bible Society.

Congratulations, Troy! Thank you for all the hard work you put into these digital tools.