What did the text identify as the "real invention" feeding the JHU dashboard map?

The pipeline feeding the map.

While the visual map was highly effective, the text emphasizes that the true innovation lay beneath the surface in the data handling infrastructure. The development of a robust data pipeline was critical. This pipeline involved the continuous, systematic process of cleaning, verifying, and normalizing raw information that came from disparate sources reporting under different standards or time stamps. This effort ensured the data flowing into the visual map—the pipeline—was accurate and usable, which was a far greater engineering challenge than merely displaying the output.