Teaching painful pasts can be challenging for instructors, and the slave trade represents a centuries-long example of crimes against humanity that affected well over twelve million Africans directly and lingers as a shadow over former slave-holding societies today.

Bunce Island: Through the Mirror is a powerful interface which immersively brings research around the slave trade to students through a digitally generated historically significant site, fostering learning, and literally embodying historical datasets to be better understood.

We have designed an educational interface between WWW’s managed datasets and university learning management systems that engages and captivates students; this is a transformative tool which will support virtual and online learning.

The project, entitled “Bunce Island: Through the Mirror” grapples with how we teach and understand the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Bunce Island is a small (502.9 meter by 106.7 meter) island located upriver from Freetown in the country of Sierra Leone. Despite its small size, it had a massive impact on global social and economic history with influences that still echo today.

This project is 1) digitally rebuilding Bunce Island and the present-day ruins and 2) building a narrative structure that guides students to learn more about this complex history. Using the open-source applications of the Unreal Engine by Epic Games, Inc and its related plugins to produce a high fidelity, hyper-realistic 3D environment, and using Unreal's Metahumans, we are creating an immersive digital world harnessing photogrammetry and GIS technologies to bring innovative research to the classroom.