The Big Names in Digital Humanities
Roberto Busa was one of the first, if not the first, to apply computing technology to the study of literature and linguistics, but there were plenty of others who followed in his footsteps.
Geoffrey Rockwell is a Digital Humanist who's important because he was one of the first to try to define what the field of "humanities computing," or "digital humanities" as it came to be known, actually was. He also helped develop some of the earliest undergraduate programs in Multimedia and Digital Humanities studies. Yep, they exist, and if Digital Humanities is a part of the academy now, it's largely thanks to this dude.
John Unsworth and Jerome McGann are two other names you should know. Unsworth, who was another early Digital Humanist, was also one of the co-editors of an important collection of essays called A Companion to Digital Humanities, and like Rockwell, he was one of the first scholars to try to come with a clear definition of what this slippery, messy, complicated field of "Humanities Computing" was.
McGann, on the other hand, is a specialist in Romantic poetry, a textual critic, and a Digital Humanist. Like Unsworth and Rockwell, he's one of the pioneers of the field. He's especially well known for creating the online archive of the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work; the creation of this archive was one of the first big projects in the Digital Humanities.
Then there's a whole host of younger Digital Humanists who have been developing and expanding the field: Stephen Ramsay set off a firestorm when he said Digital Humanities is all about "building" things (we'll look more closely at his ideas in the "Say What?" section below). Matthew G. Kirschenbaum has discussed the relationship between the Digital Humanities and English departments, specifically. Mark Sample is known as a scholar who advocates for an "Open-Access" approach to the Digital Humanities—as in: let's make knowledge available to all, for free!