describes the NECTE corpus in detail, and makes it available to academic researchers, educationalists, the media in non-commercial applications, and organisations such as language societies and individuals with a serious interest in historical dialect materials. Exploratory multivariate analysis of text corpora Since completion of the NECTE project he has been developing a methodology for sociolinguistic and dialectological study of the corpus, the aim of which is to attempt to identify interesting regularities in phonetic variation among informants in the corpus, and any correlations between such variation and associated social factors. The methodology is based on the one formulated by the originators of much of the NECTE corpus, the Tyneside Linguistic Survey (TLS). It was radical at the time and remains so today: in contrast to the then-universal and still-dominant theory driven approach, where social and linguistic factors are selected by the analyst on the basis of some combination of an independently specified theoretical framework, existing case studies, and personal experience of the domain of enquiry, the TLS proposed a fundamentally empirical approach in which salient factors are extracted from the data itself and then serve as the basis for model construction. To implement its approach the TLS used a particular exploratory multivariate analytical technique, hierarchical cluster analysis, but its work never progressed beyond preliminary studies for a variety of theoretical and practical reasons. His development of the TLS methodology i. uses a range of linear and nonlinear exploratory analytical methods in addition to hierarchical cluster analysis, such as multidimensional scaling and self-organizing maps, and ii. pays particular attention to issues in data creation which are crucial to the validity of analytical results: document length normalization, dimensionality reduction, and data nonlinearity. Relevant publications are Moisl, H. and Beal, J.C. (2001) ‘Corpus Analysis and Results: Visualization Using Self-Organizing Maps’, Corpus Linguistics 2001, Lancaster University, 386–391. Electronic Publication. Moisl, H, Jones, V (2005) Cluster analysis of the Newcastle electronic corpus of Tyneside English: a comparison of methods. Centre for Telematics and Information Technology [CTIT] ; TR 2005/65) {A-53328} University of Twente. Moisl, H, Jones V., (2005) 'Cluster analysis of the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: a comparison of methods', Literary and Linguistic Computing 20, 125–46. [Online journal version] [Preprint] Moisl, H., Maguire W, Allen W., (2006) 'Phonetic variation in Tyneside: exploratory multivariate analysis of the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English'. In: F. Hinskens, ed. Language Variation. European Perspectives. Amsterdam: Meertens Institute.