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